Neutrality: A Guide for the Organizational Ombudsperson

Like dispute resolution practitioners in other arenas, organizational ombudspeople face profound challenges in dealing with the issue of neutrality. For ombuds, it is useful to view neutrality as composed of three major dimensions: the definition or terms of reference for the position; its institutional location; and the interactions of the ombuds within the organization. The authors analyze each of these conditions, and offer advice on how ombudspeople can maintain and enhance their neutrality.     

The Practice of One Ombudsman

This essay delineates the influences and constraints upon theauthor's practice as an ombuds in two different Canadian universities overmore than twenty years. My hope is that an account of my practice as itevolved day by day will help to shed light on the divergences in practiceamong particular groups of ombuds practitioners, notably government orlegislative ombudsmen; corporate ombudsmen; and academic ombudspersons inboth Canada and the United States.     

Attorneys and Negotiation Ethics: A Material Misunderstanding?

Our research suggests that a true norm of ethical negotiation behavior exists within the legal profession. This conclusion is tempered, however, with the knowledge that a large minority of our research respondents — at times approaching one‐third of them — engaged in unethical and even fraudulent behavior. Additionally, the survey respondents were not saddled with the pressures that practicing attorneys typically confront (pressures likely to make people behave less, rather than more, ethically). In an attempt to understand the reasons for such a high frequency of unethical negotiation, we have identified three major contributing factors: too many lawyers have only a superficial understanding of rules that are more complicated than they appear; lawyers frequently take their “zealous advocate” role too far, thereby placing client loyalty above other important values such as respect for truth and justice; and the practice of law and the people who are drawn to it are highly competitive. To address these factors, we suggest approaching the problem from several different angles. In the classroom, we suggest a focus on the relevant legal standards, including a focus on the often misunderstood law of fraudulent misrepresentations. Because many students fail to appreciate the differences between “ethical” behavior, the floor of socially acceptable conduct, and the expectations that others have for how they will be treated, we also suggest that lawyer training programs focus on the important role that personal relationships and one's reputation play in the legal profession, and how falling short in these areas can decrease one's negotiation effectiveness. For the profession itself, we also suggest clarifying the attorney rules of conduct and provide a number of tactics and strategies to defend against lying and deception during negotiation. Finally, we recognize there are certain psychological factors at play that can cause people to engage in behavior inconsistent with their personal sense of ethics. We believe the only way to avoid these lapses is to integrate conscious and reflective practices that can bring ethical concerns to the forefront of lawyers' decision‐making and thought processes.     

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS … BOEKAANKONDIGINGS

SUMMARY

• In this article a number of general principles and practical tasks awaiting South African publishers are discussed by Andries Walter Oliphant, editor of Staffrider. Some of the points discussed are:

• the need for all South African publishers to underwrite non-racist democratic values;

• the need for South African publishers to advocate and defend the right of the reading public to have access to all published material and information;

• the need for publishers to counter the history of injustice, ignorance, racial prejudice and oppression by exposing and criticising any manifestation of it in society, the state and the media; and

• to give space to subordinate classes, such as workers and gender groups, to articulate their interests and conceptions of what freedom and social justice might mean to them.

     

Crossing to Safety from Cold War America: The Collaboration and Friendship of John Paton Davies,Jr. and George Frost Kennan

This analysis probes the interwoven careers and lives of two distinguished American diplomats, John Paton Davies, Jr. and George Frost Kennan. These Foreign Service officers, who rose to prominence in the years immediately after the Second World War, were embroiled in the formulation and implementation of controversial policy during the early Cold War. The experience of Davies and Kennan illustrates the domestic hazards that have dogged American foreign policy-making even into the present. Yet the focus here is on their friendship—a subject hitherto little examined in the scholarly literature—its connexion to the evolution of their policy recommendations, its steadying power in moments of moral and personal crisis, its tempering effect on failure. The assessment also draws on a notable work of fiction, Wallace Stegner’s 1987 Crossing to Safety, to consider the ineffable nature of friendship itself.     

The right to broadcast: towards a broadcasting charter for South Africa

SUMMARY

In this article Michael Markovitz, chairman of the Broadcasting Commission of the Film and Allied Workers Organisation (FAWO) argues:

• that present broadcasting statutes restrict access to the technological means of communication in South African society which prevails now;

• that broadcasting is an issue of national and constitutional importance;

• that the deregulation of broadcasting, with protection or non-profit broadcast services, could benefit the negotiation process;

• that private sector domination of both the broadcasting and print media sectors would be incompatible with the extension of freedom of expression in South Africa;

• that prevailing broadcasting legislation effectively prohibits community broadcasting; and

• that the right to broadcast and broadcast freedom should be entrenched in a Bill of Rights.

     

Religion,state, and terrorism: A global analysis

ABSTRACT

This article investigates two ways in which state involvement in religion—minority and majority restriction—generates terrorism. Using a time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 174 countries from 1991–2009, this study finds that when religiously devout people find themselves marginalized through either form of religious restriction, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence. The article concludes with recommendations for policymakers.     

To Tell the Truth: Ad Watch Coverage,Ad Tone,and the Accuracy of Political Advertising

This study examined the relationships among newspaper ad watch coverage, ad tone, and the accuracy of political advertising. A sample of political advertisements (N = 160) was drawn from the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) database and other sources for eight U.S. Senate races. Two experts on each race evaluated the ads’ accuracy and their ideological portrayals of candidates, while trained coders analyzed other aspects of the ads. Ad watch coverage from these races (ad watch N = 109) also was content-analyzed. The number of ad watches overall in a race and the number that explicitly criticized ads were positively related with the level of accuracy of political ads and with a tendency to portray their favored candidates closer to their actual ideological position—but the overall number of ad watches also was positively related with a tendency for ads to portray opponents as more extreme than their positions warranted. Ad watches usually tend to scrutinize negative ads more, but ad watch coverage in this study was unrelated with ad tone and with the number of negative ads in a race. Positive ads were rated as more accurate but also more prone to exaggerate the supported candidates’ centrism compared to other ads. Normative and practical implications are discussed.

We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.

— Neil Newhouse, pollster for the Mitt Romney 2012 campaign     

Race,Interracial Families,and Political Advertising in the Obama Era: Experimental Evidence

Across two studies of race and interracial families in political advertising, this article finds that significant benefits accrue to Black candidates who present themselves as part of interracial families. These findings suggest Black candidates are more likely to succeed when they engage in displays of “racial novelty,” or counter-stereotypical behavior, provided that behavior signals closer affinity to White voters. For Study 1, we tested four original advertisements for a fictitious political candidate, in which we varied only the candidate’s race and the race of his son. The Black candidate with the White son prevailed over all other combinations, with respondents finding him the most trustworthy, most qualified for office, most likely to share their values, and most likely to care about people like them. For Study 2, we tested four new original advertisements for a fictitious Black candidate, varying only the candidate’s profession and the race of his son. We find, again, that Black candidates who display non-Black children do significantly better than Black candidates who display racially homogeneous families. However, we observe much more modest benefits for a Black candidate who practices a racially novel profession. We view these results as demonstrating that Black candidates are more likely to reap the rewards of racial novelty only when they are willing to provide a personal, rather than professional, signal of their affinity for Whites. As Study 2 shows, White voters in particular are responsive to personal (rather than professional) demonstrations of racial novelty. This affirms the logic of “New Racism,” whereby Blacks are looked favorably upon if they exhibit behavior associated with Whites, but penalized otherwise.     

Global Governance Structure for Infectious Disease: An Enforceable Strategy

Emerging trends suggest a more inclusive and collaborative approach to addressing international infectious disease issues, but without an overarching governance structure and judicial forum in place, outcomes will remain suboptimal. This essay outlines and analyzes several initiatives currently underway and proposes a new comprehensive global governance structure for infectious disease. This proposed structure has built-in incentives for states—from both the developed and developing world—to meet their regulatory obligations and integrates the myriad non-state actors operating in this space, including NGOs and the private sector. It also incorporates an adjudicative body that is able to enforce compliance and resolve issues of contention. Lastly, this essay identifies innovative funding mechanisms and contemplates the venue best suited to host and administer this new global governance structure for infectious disease with a focus on UN-based models.

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Islam,institutions and insurgency: territorial and network jihad

Contemporary research and policies often reduce Islamic insurgency to a simpli?ed notion of jihad, and, simultaneously, the religious doctrine of jihad to pure militancy. Such an approach fails to consider the complexities that de?ne and di?erentiate Islamic insurgents, and hinders further understanding of when, how and if they implement jihad. This paper attempts to address these shortcomings by considering how the ideological histories in?uencing territorially-based movements yield either an adherence to a modern jihad doctrine or a secular nationalist doctrine. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories provide the case studies wherein this distinction is manifest in their respective popular bases, institutions and military relations. Responding to assumptions of an emergent ‘third form’ of jihad—the network—this study applies the inverse model of the territorial doctrines to the Arab-Afghans and al-Qaeda (the network headed by Osama bin Laden) in order to elucidate its potential explanatory limitations, as well asto o?er some insights.     

Flipping the Switch: Combat,State Building,and Junior Officers in Iraq and Afghanistan

Contemporary us counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan requires junior leaders to engage in both combat and state-building activities. This study aims to explain the fundamental challenge in merging these. I argue that difficulty lies in separating insurgents from civilians, and translating doctrine from senior to junior officers. Junior officers consistently develop a similar ad hoc decision-making tool— role-switching—to simplify complex situations to a binary of “hostile or not.” They understand themselves to fill only two roles, the violent “on” role and the non-violent “off” role and develop several tools to minimize the difficulty of role-switching, help their subordinates switch, and signal switching to local populations. Ultimately, however, problems with role-switching—role stickiness, inappropriate switching, and role bias—can in some cases encourage indiscriminate and excessive violence, pointing to the fundamental failures of using military forces as a one-size-fits-all solution to state-building projects abroad.     

Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age,by Alasdair Roberts

This article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions—the conventional political press and the party system—mediate the effects of political communication. Reporters allocated positive and negative coverage to Perot according to the same rules that they normally follow, and voters were as responsive to this coverage as they were to media coverage of two earlier “outsider” candidates for president, Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart. Part I of this article, which appeared in the previous issue of Political Communication, dealt with the earliest, relatively unmediated phase of Perot's campaign and the takeoff phase of the mediated campaign. Part II deals with the remainder of the campaign, including the general election.     

The latest Turkish–Greek détente: instrumentalist play for EU membership,or long‐term institutionalist cooperation?

The recent thaw in bilateral Greek–Turkish relations is promising, yet insufficient for future stability and cooperation in and around the Aegean Sea. The main reason lies in the prevalence of instrumental‐strategic thinking on the part of both states. Neither Greece nor Turkey has approached the settlement of their disputes from a perspective that would imply an eagerness to build a collective identity based on the institutional norms of European international society as represented by the European Union. On the contrary, Europeanisation has not been an end in itself but a means for the materialisation of their preconceived national interests. The underlying motivation behind their attempts to reach a solution appears to have arisen from instrumental concerns vis‐à‐vis both the EU and each other. The dynamics of their independent relations with the European Union seem to have compelled them to come to a modus vivendi over these issues, since otherwise their relative status vis‐à‐vis the EU would likely deteriorate. This article will discuss the main aspects of the latest Turkish–Greek cooperation process within the framework of rationalist instrumentalist and sociological institutionalist debate in international relations theory. It will be contended that a lasting and long‐term cooperation between the two countries can only follow the formation of collective identities and common national foreign policy interests, particularly as they relate to the European Union framework.     

Undermining Adversaries: Unipolarity,Threat Perception,and Negative Balancing Strategies after the Cold War

This paper engages the ongoing soft balancing debate by suggesting a new analytical framework for states’ countervailing strategies—a negative balancing model—to explain why states do not form alliances and conduct arms races to balance against power or threats as they previously did. Negative balancing refers to a state's strategies or diplomatic efforts aiming to undermine a rival's power. By contrast, positive balancing means to strengthen a state's own power in world politics. I argue that a state's balancing strategies are shaped by the level of threat perception regarding its rival. The higher the threat perception, the more likely it is for a state to choose positive balancing. The lower the threat perception, the more likely it is for a state to choose negative balancing. I suggest that the hegemon provides security as a public good to the international system in a unipolar world in which the relatively low-threat propensity of the system renders positive balancing strategies incompatible with state interests after the Cold War. Instead, states have employed various negative balancing strategies to undermine each other's power, especially when dealing with us primacy. China's negative balancing strategy against the United States and the us negative balancing strategy against Russia are two case studies that test the validity of the negative balancing model.     

The rise of film production and the politics of the star system in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The rise of film production and the ubiquitous presence of the ‘new wave’ of South African films on the international scene in recent years have raised expectations amongst local film stars hoping to get their biggest break by taking leading roles in major South African productions. However, most of these films – particularly co-productions – have continuously used foreign stars in leading roles. As a result, local stars have constantly voiced concerns about the proliferation of foreign artists in leading roles in South African productions. Many explanations have been offered in trying to understand why filmmakers tend to cast a foreign star when a local one could probably do a better job (in, for example, portraying a local icon like Nelson Mandela) and still command a lesser fee. However, this article puts forward that most of these arguments are based on intuition rather than on the real dynamics and externalities governing this practice. The article attempts to make sense of this issue by arguing that the rationale for this practice stems from a film being a high-risk investment that it is driven by the broader financial imperatives of film production. The article offers empirical evidence to suggest that stars do not add economic value to the film, but to themselves (see Elberse 2005), since the bulk of the money goes towards their appearance fees. It is concluded that the traditional model guiding film finance and the logic behind it need to be looked at afresh, given the fact that several films have failed at the box office, both locally and internationally, despite featuring major foreign stars, compared to the massive success of some local films (e.g., Jerusalema, Tsotsi and Yesterday) with local stars in the leading roles.     

The Problem of Nuclear Harm for Andrew Linklater,Lorraine Elliott and Other Contemporary Cosmopolitans

In a paper that helped inaugurate the subfield of Environmental Philosophy in 1973, Richard Routley located the seed of Western anthropocentrism in the liberal harm principle. Yet, beginning in the late 1990s, Andrew Linklater began globalising the harm principle with no reference to Routley, or to the enduring debates about the moral status of the non-human world. In this article, I offer a preliminary sketch—no more than that—as to why Routley was right to reject the idea of a harm principle being contained within a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic, and that Linklater, Lorraine Elliott and their contemporary cosmopolitan colleagues—whatever the extent of their human-centredness—have been wrong to ignore him. I do so by intruding the problem of nuclear harm into Linklater’s cosmopolitan account of harm in world politics. Approaching the concept of harm through the prism of the nuclear age is interesting and important, I argue, since it both takes seriously Linklater’s intuition that the cosmopolitan response to the emergence of nuclear harms is evidence of a global harm narrative, and because it serves to ground Linklater’s otherwise abstract theorising in the harm par excellence of world politics.     

Caught in the Middle: The United Nations Emergency Force,Israel, and the 1960 “Rotem Crisis”

The refusal of the UN forces in Lebanon to accede to Israel's request to provide information on events they were witness to (the October 2000 abduction of three Israeli soldiers on the border), and the subsequent crisis between the two, are not unprecedented. A much more severe crisis broke out in 1960 after nearly the entire Egyptian army surprisingly deployed a few kilometres behind the UN Emergency Force's (UNEF) posts along the border with Israel in Sinai. Israel hurried to request UNEF to provide information—considered crucial to its survival—on this deployment, but was refused.

The author reviews this unknown incident and tracks on the diplomatic efforts made by the then UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld alongside about UNEF's role and functions in this affair. He examines the UN's refusal and concludes that while the Egyptians did partially violate some informal understandings with the UNSG, it was indeed justified.     

Multipolarity and instability in the Middle East

Tensions have long been a feature of the international relations of the Middle East. After the 2011 Arab uprisings, regional instability is being driven by a confluence of three interrelated developments. First, the weakening role of the United States as a power balancer in the Middle East, combined with the larger global context, has provided assumptions about threats and new opportunities for local and other actors to pursue strategic and foreign policy objectives that have deepened tensions and regional competition. Second, there has been a juxtaposing of power multipolarity with ideological multipolarity, itself a source of increased instability, with two of the regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, fanning opposing sectarian flames to further their respective strategic objectives. Third, this strategic competition is being played out in several newly weakened or collapsing states such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Similarly, the regional powers’ competition in previously weakened states, such as Lebanon and Iraq, has intensified due to the acquisition of new, sectarian dimensions. These developments are likely to perpetuate instability and tensions in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.

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U.S.—Soviet relations: The global village and the free flow of information∗

For the past sixty‐seven years, the Council on Foreign Relations has dedicated itself to enlarging the public dialogue on matters affecting U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. This effort is to be commended. It stands as a testimony to your strong sense of civic responsibility, and it illustrates yet another way in which America's private and public sectors cooperate in matters of national concern.

Forty‐one years ago, Foreign Affairs published the landmark article—"Mr. X"— calling for a bold new approach to the challenges of the post‐war world. At that time, the international structure and order inherited from the nineteenth century had collapsed, and attempts to replace it were directed from two philosophically distinct and antagonistic power centers. This was the era of the Cold War.

America met those challenges with a sense of daring and determination. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO—these stand as testimonials to imaginative leadership and effort. The renewed vitality of Western Europe and Japan—protected by the shield of a strong and effective deterrence—are a measure of its success.

Today, America faces another historic challenge occasioned neither by war nor post‐war dislocations. Rather, it results from changes set in motion by a new and powerful dynamic which in recent years has exploded onto the world scene—the grand spectacle of the Information Revolution.