The challenge of diversity management: police reform and the Arab minority in Israel

Diverse societies present different challenges for police forces that have to gain the trust and legitimacy of minorities. Police forces must develop the ability to engage with diversity and overcome their own biases and prejudices in order to better serve minorities. Police reforms, however, may fail to address the challenge successfully if core problems are not clearly identified. In such a case, reforms may be misdirected and fail to achieve the desired results. This paper, based on a study of the Arab minority in Israel, suggests a bottom-up approach that concentrates on identifying the attitudes of minority groups as the basis for any reform plan. A survey was conducted among Arab citizens to identify general attitudes, perceptions of over-policing and under-policing and assessment of three potential reforms; recruitment of minority members into the police, community involvement in policing, and cultural training for police officers.     

What price fairness when security is at stake? Police legitimacy in South Africa

The legitimacy of legal authorities – particularly the police – is central to the state's ability to function in a normatively justifiable and effective manner. Studies, mostly conducted in the US and UK, regularly find that procedural justice is the most important antecedent of police legitimacy, with judgments about other aspects of police behavior – notably, about effectiveness – appearing less relevant. But this idea has received only sporadic testing in less cohesive societies where social order is more tenuous, resources to sustain it scarcer, and the position of the police is less secure. This paper considers whether the link between process fairness and legitimacy holds in the challenging context of present day South Africa. In a high crime and socially divided society, do people still emphasize procedural fairness or are they more interested in instrumental effectiveness? How is the legitimacy of the police influenced by the wider problems faced by the South African state? We find procedural fairness judgments play a key role, but also that South Africans place greater emphasis on police effectiveness (and concerns about crime). Police legitimacy is, furthermore, associated with citizens' judgments about the wider success and trustworthiness of the state.     

Managing in the Regulatory Thicket: Regulation Legitimacy and Expertise

Although the influence of government regulation on organizations is undeniable, empirical research in this field is scarce. This article investigates how the understanding of and attitudes toward government regulation among public, nonprofit, and for‐profit managers affect organizational performance, using U.S. nursing homes as the empirical setting. Findings suggest that managers’ perceptions of regulation legitimacy—views of regulation fairness, inspectors’ effectiveness, and internal utility of the mandates—positively affect service quality. Subgroup analysis suggests that managers’ views of regulation matter in nonprofit and for‐profit organizations but not in public organizations. In nonprofit homes, performance declines when managers report higher regulatory expertise—better knowledge of the regulatory standards. In for‐profit facilities, frequent communication with regulators lowers quality. These findings suggest that the regulated entities’ views of government regulation are central to their success, which necessitates improvements in the regulatory process.     

Visible Muslimness in Scotland: between discrimination and integration

ABSTRACT

Bonino's article casts light on the realities and perceptions of ethno-religious discrimination among Muslims in Scotland, with particular reference to those living in Edinburgh, during both everyday social interaction with the indigenous Scottish community, and contact with police and security officers. Discrimination against ethnic minorities in Scotland can be traced back in history; however, it is its post-9/11 multifaceted form that has particularly targeted Muslims qua Muslims in a global climate of distrust and stigmatization. While publicly available statistics show a decrease in racist incidents in Scotland, findings from other studies illustrate a more complex situation in which prejudice and discrimination intermingle in ways that make it hard to quantify the precise extent of anti-Muslim sentiment. Qualitative data collected specifically in Edinburgh suggest that Muslims’ hyper-visibility has triggered ethno-religious discrimination by some members of the non-Muslim majority. However, the daily experiences of life in Scotland, and the social relations with non-Muslims, are more heterogeneous and nuanced; they include overall positive views of, and a certain engagement with, many non-Muslims in a context of relative harmony. Contact with police and security officers at airports constitutes the main area of concern for Scottish Muslims, whose confidence, sense of equality and feelings of belonging to society are severely undermined by the securitization of their ethno-religious difference. The path towards a pluralistic Scottishness rests on sociopolitical and institutional efforts to reduce the discrimination against visible diversity, especially at loci of security, and to include the symbolic and physical distinctiveness of Muslimness within the porous Scottish cultural boundaries.     

UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies

ABSTRACT

Analyses of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources – in particular output and procedural legitimacy – and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and the specific case of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical, and it shows how the UN’s contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions.     

Legitimacy,citizenship and state redress

This article explores how state redress programmes work to legitimate the state. The primary thesis concerns how state redress aims to restructure citizenship identity. This restructuring enables civic identification by victims of state wrongdoing which in turn enables greater legitimacy. Consequently, redress constitutes a movement by the state from lesser to greater legitimacy. The article illustrates the legitimating thesis by examining two Canadian responses to state wrongdoing with regard to indigenous peoples, Gathering Strength (1998) and the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat). This context provides material for contrasting the legitimating thesis with a competing approach – redress as ‘therapy’.     

Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?

The debate over possible bias in the use of deadly force has recently been exacerbated by highly publicized killings of African American males around the country. While much research has been conducted examining police behavior, little has been done to investigate the impact of race on police behavior. This article aims to answer this question: are white police officers more likely to use lethal force on minority suspects or people of a specific race? To answer this question, the authors construct a data set of all confirmed uses of lethal force by police officers in the United States in 2014 and 2015. They find that although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers.     

Does Twitter Increase Perceived Police Legitimacy?

Social media use has become increasingly popular among police forces. The literature suggests that social media use can increase perceived police legitimacy by enabling transparency and participation. Employing data from a large and representative survey of Dutch citizens (N = 4,492), this article tests whether and how social media use affects perceived legitimacy for a major social media platform, Twitter. A negligible number of citizens engage online with the police, and thus the findings reveal no positive relationship between participation and perceived legitimacy. The article shows that by enhancing transparency, Twitter does increase perceived police legitimacy, albeit to a limited extent. Subsequent analysis of the mechanism shows both an affective and a cognitive path from social media use to legitimacy. Overall, the findings suggest that establishing a direct channel with citizens and using it to communicate successes does help the police strengthen their legitimacy, but only slightly and for a small group of interested citizens.     

The evolution of regime imaginaries on the Chinese Internet

ABSTRACT

This study examines popular perceptions about the ruling state on the Chinese Internet before and along the state’s project of ‘online public opinion guidance.’ We chose two historical moments from 2011 and 2016, and systematically captured and analysed massive amounts of speech traces on Weibo that contain the term tizhi, a discursively flexible, yet distinctive, concept onto which sentiments related to the state are projected. Combining semantic network clustering and critical discourse analysis, our analyses have revealed, historically and macroscopically, the relative dominance of differing ways of evaluating regime legitimacy on the Chinese Internet. Among other things, the previously dominant legitimacy-challenging imaginary grounded in (Western) democratic references has imploded and become absorbed by a nationalist, ‘civilizational competition’ discourse that enhances regime legitimacy. Additionally, the legitimacy-criticizing imaginary within the party-state’s ‘reform framework’ has become depoliticized into administration-focused compartments. By exploring the ‘regime imaginaries’ held by ordinary people, this study complements the scholarship on Chinese state legitimacy that predominantly focuses on historico-structural analyses, policy initiatives, or the party elite’s normative justifications. It also makes methodological and conceptual advances for researching the complex cultural frames, political tropes, and repertoires of local references that comprise regime imaginaries.     

Does Increasing Ethnic Representativeness Reduce Police Misconduct?

This article examines whether representative bureaucracy improves organizational integrity using evidence from English and Welsh police forces that implemented ambitious targets to increase the share of ethnic minority officers during 2000–2010. The evidence shows an association between an increase in police force ethnic minority representation and a subsequent reduction in police misconduct. An increase in representativeness is also shown to be associated with a decrease in the share of black complainants but not with a change in the ethnicity of those subject to complaints. This evidence suggests that diversifying a bureaucratic workforce to reflect the community it serves may effectively catalyze bureaucratic integrity. In turn, improved organizational integrity influences bureaucrats’ attitudes and behaviors toward minority citizens, resulting in greater satisfaction among minority constituents. Representative bureaucracy may be an effective internal means of controlling administrative power for the good of the citizenry.     

The Limits of Tolerance: Nation–State Building and What It Means for Minority Groups

Abstract

When we think of the most egregious forms of intolerance directed against minority communities we tend to associate them with particularly despicable regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where racism, ideology or some special route to development is often held to blame, or where ultra-nationalism swamps positive tendencies towards democracy and a civil society. In this essay Levene proposes a partial corrective to this view with reference to the supposedly ‘good’ nation–state derived from the western liberal model. He considers the behaviour of two such states at their inception, Poland and Israel, with regard to two minorities, Jews and Arabs, with the Jews providing linkage between the two state trajectories. Levene charts their respective rejections of bi-national or multinational development, and suggests that the fact that both states today maintain a modicum of tolerance towards their residual Jewish and Arab minorities is more the result of (paradoxical) good luck than of conscious, benevolent design. In conclusion Levene proposes that the very nature of the modern nation–state militates against genuine pluralistic tolerance, a goal that requires a massive structural re-ordering of contemporary society away from global economies to a sustainability of human scale.     

The role of East Timor's security institutions in national integration – and disintegration

Abstract

This article examines the interplay between security sector developments and national unity in East Timor since the Indonesian occupation ended in 1999. Particular attention is paid to the regional distinction between Loromonu and Lorosae – people from the west and east of East Timor, respectively. In 2006, East Timor experienced a crisis that saw the disintegration of the military and police forces, and widespread violence that led to massive internal displacement. It was during this crisis that the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction first emerged as a major societal cleavage. The article argues that the independence cause and the guerrilla force Falintil had been an important focus of East Timorese national unity in 1999. In the years that followed, however, the implementation of flawed security policies led to new military and police forces that were politicized, factionalized and lacking in cohesion. Prior to the 2006 crisis, the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction was primarily an issue within the army. As the crisis escalated, however, the violence was to a large extent framed by the east–west dimension, and popular perceptions of the military as ‘eastern’ and the police as ‘western’ hardened. A year after the crisis, little if any progress had been made towards reducing the increased salience of the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction in society. The main internal security challenges – gang activity, the unresolved issue of the so-called ‘petitioners’, and the destabilizing role played by fugitive former head of military police Alfredo Reinado – all had an east–west dimension. The article also finds that new initiatives aimed at reforming East Timor's military and police forces appeared to be lacking in both depth and relevance for addressing the country's new level of internal division, and its immediate, internal security challenges.     

Forcible Stops: Police and Citizens Speak Out

A recent federal district court decision found that the New York City Police Department engaged in unconstitutional policing. Officers stopped millions of minority young men over the span of several years. Most of those stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing. This article uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate these inequities, examining the views of both the police and those who were stopped. The authors find that pressure on officers emanating from headquarters was responsible for much of the illegal behavior by lower‐level officers. Additionally, youth in minority neighborhoods felt mistreated by the police; this led to distrust in the police. The authors suggest solutions to ameliorate this painful episode in police practice. The article concludes with specific recommendations such as reducing management pressure on officers and police developing community partnerships.     

Measuring majority power and veto power of voting rules

We study voting rules with respect to how they allow or limit a majority from dominating minorities: whether a voting rule makes a majority powerful and whether minorities can veto the candidates they do not prefer. For a given voting rule, the minimal share of voters that guarantees a victory to one of the majority’s most preferred candidates is the measure of majority power; and the minimal share of voters that allows the minority to veto each of their least preferred candidates is the measure of veto power. We find tight bounds on such minimal shares for voting rules that are popular in the literature and used in real elections. We order the rules according to majority power and veto power. Instant-runoff voting has both the highest majority power and the highest veto power; plurality rule has the lowest. In general, the greater is the majority power of a voting rule, the greater its veto power. The three exceptions are: voting with proportional veto power, Black’s rule and Borda’s rule, which have relatively weak majority power and strong veto power, thus providing minority protection. Our results can shed light on how voting rules provide different incentives for voter participation and candidate nomination.

     

Why might constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies come into confrontation with each other?

The paper develops a model for examining ethnic conflict in Southeast Asia, using Indonesia as an illustrative case. Ethnic conflict is explained as arising not out of the facts of ethno-cultural pluralism, but rather out of the disentwining of the three visions of the nation: as civic community, as ethno-cultural community and as multicultural community.This disentwining occurs particularly in the context of pressures for democratization. Three aspects of politics are identified as promoting the disentwining so as to engender the weakening of the civic nationalist vision, and thence the confrontation between a majoritarian ethno-cultural nationalism and a minority-focused multicultural nationalism. First, the spread of ideas related to democracy generates the spread of liberal forms of the three nationalist visions, alongside the authoritarian forms, and puts the spotlight on the divergences between these visions. Ideas of democracy are then highjacked by ethnic majorities claiming majority rights, and by ethnic minorities claiming minority rights. Second, the patrimonial basis for politics in much of Southeast Asia means that ethnic majorities and minorities alike perceive democratization as the search for responsive patrons, rather than as the search for civic equality. Third, civic nationalism is further weakened by the erosion of faith in the social justice promises of state elites. While these features of politics promote ethnic tensions, they also generate countervailing factors that ensure the political disunity of ethnic minorities, and thereby inhibit the extent of ethnic conflict.     

Solidarity,equality, and freedom in Pettit’s republicanism

This article discusses Pettit’s views of social justice and political legitimacy in On the People’s Terms. Although Pettit’s book presents a powerful account of the ideal of nondomination, this article probes some deficiencies regarding important questions about solidarity, equality, and feasibility.     

Terror,territoriality and the struggle for indigeneity and citizenship in northern Nigeria

The struggle of the minority ethnic groups against the majority Hausa-Fulani ethnic-amalgam in the north of Nigeria has persisted. As a result of the twentieth-century jihad and politico-cultural and economic factors, Fulani (Muslims) are found in many parts of the minority areas of the geographical north. Many of the minority ethnic groups often claim to be ‘indigenous’ to the areas and regard the Fulani – and Hausa – as ‘settlers’. The struggle for political, economic and social values and rights in these communities often produce violent clashes between these indigenous groups and the settler Hausa-Fulani. This paper uses the territorial claims and counter-claims over indigeneity in the Yelwa area between the Tarok/other ethnic (Christian) groups and the Fulani/other ethnic (Muslim) groups which degenerated into serial blood-letting in 2004 to interrogate the citizen-deficit in Nigeria, and the contradictions of reconciling indigenous rights with citizenship rights in a typical multi-ethnic postcolonial state.     

Civil society and the contemporary threat to religious freedom in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Against the international backdrop of rising religious tensions, this article explores contemporary civil society views on religious freedom in Bangladesh. It uses critical frame analysis of the corpus of civil society organizations’ (CSOs) submissions to the United Nations’ third cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR), 2013–18. It provides a timely assessment of Bangladesh’s fulfilment of international obligations on religious freedom, and shows how the politicization of religion and the resultant conflict between ‘secularism’ and ‘extremism’ have been fuelling inter-communal tensions and religious intolerance. In particular, CSOs’ UPR submissions present powerful accounts of the principal human rights pathology affecting the country today, religious-based violence. This is accompanied by a narrative of police malpractice, judicial failings, discrimination, oppression and incitement. A further key finding is ‘situated knowledge’ or first-hand accounts of legal restrictions and government repression of civil society organizations. Consonant with the classical work of liberal theorists, we argue that unprecedented importance now attaches to safeguarding civil society criticality in order to defend religious freedom and uphold human rights in the Republic.     

Mehrheitstyrannei durch Volksentscheide?

The article presents an examination of the question of whether minorities’ rights are somewhat protected or discriminated against by direct democratic decisions. It also delivers an investigation into the decisive factors which have a discriminatory or protective effect in the popular vote. Empirical analyses revealed that direct democracy cannot per se be considered a majority sword with a sharp blade or, conversely, a protective shield for minorities. Rather, the impact of direct democratic devices strongly depends on the degree of integration of the affected minority and the perception as a foreign group.