The relationship between human trafficking and child recruitment in the Colombian armed conflict

The article rethinks the relationship between human trafficking as organised crime and child recruitment as a war crime. After analysing the records of 132 cases of child and adolescent recruitment brought before Colombia’s ordinary justice system between 2008 and 2016, it became clear that the youngsters involved had performed activities both directly and indirectly related to the conflict, but also that they had been exploited and maltreated, with no control over their situation. Reassessment of the relationship between human trafficking and child recruitment could result in more effective justice for this population by shedding light on alternate ways to construct reparation and reintegration.     

Crime, organised crime and corruption in post-communist Europe and the CIS

This article examines the incomplete and sometimes contradictory evidence on the crime, organised crime and corruption situations in post-communist states, and then seeks to explain the apparent increase in all three in early post-communism. Among the factors considered are the impact of weak states and economies, neo-liberalism, globalisation, Schengen and Fortress Europe, the Communist legacy (the ‘ghost from the past’), and collusion. The article then examines the dynamics of criminality and malfeasance in the region, and provides evidence to suggest that the crime and corruption situation has stabilised or even improved in most post-communist countries in recent times. The factors considered for explaining this apparent improvement are the role of external agents (notably the EU), the move from transition to consolidation, and the role of political will.     

Subversion and Countersubversion in the Campaign against Terrorism in Europe

This article examines how Europe fits into the broader international campaign against terrorism. It argues that Europe is both a source and a target of terrorist activity, and faces threats including Al Qaeda–inspired terrorism, extremist political parties, insurgent sympathizer networks, subversive movements, and the overlap between crime and terrorism. The article argues that the primary threat is terrorist-linked subversion, which seeks to manipulate and exploit the sociological and ethnographic features of immigrant communities. Islamic theology is a strictly secondary factor, and a focus on Islam as such is likely to be an analytical dead-end. The article examines countersubversion as a conceptual framework for counterterrorism in Europe. The article concludes that an approach based on trusted networks and close collaboration with communities is most likely to succeed.     

Centred discourse,decentred practice: the relational production of Russian and Chinese ‘rising’ power in Central Asia

Abstract

This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but rather are led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units that concentrate power in their executives, fetishise territorial sovereignty, recruit client states, contest regional hegemony and explicitly oppose the post-1945 international order. In contrast, we demonstrate that the centred discourse of Eurasian integration promoted by Russian and Chinese leaders is decentred by networks of business and political elites, especially with regard to capital accumulation. Adopting Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (subversion, hybridity) and J. C. Scott’s conception of mētis (local knowledge, agency), and using examples of Russian and Chinese investments and infrastructure projects in Central Asia, we argue that in order to understand centring discourse we must look to decentring practices at the periphery; that is, rising power is produced through ongoing interactions between actors at the margins of the state’s hegemonic reach.     

Crime and community-based intervention strategies: exploring opportunities through partnerships between local government and a low-income community

Crime and fear of crime represent growing threats to quality of life which have many social, political and economic implications for society. Traditional law enforcement tactics to mitigate these threats have been ineffective in low-income communities and neighborhoods. This research examines a partnership between local government and a low-income, minority community which teamed community policing with a community-based organization for purposes of community development. The perceptions of three primary groups of stakeholders including youth, parents and community leaders are used to assess differences in perspective related to fear of crime. Findings indicate that community leaders involved with development efforts were much more likely to define crime and fear of crime as serious in comparison to citizens who live in crime-plagued communities. A relationship between adult and youth held fear suggests intergenerational transfer of fear of crime between adults and youth. Findings indicate progress addressing crime and fear of crime through a partnership with local government and community policing even though the community has not fully accepted the community-based organization as a vehicle for change. The preliminary results reported here suggest that community policing strategies may be useful for stabilizing the community and laying the foundation for community-based development.     

Sustainable Development in Developing Countries: The Role of Social Entrepreneurs

Internationally, there has been a general trend towards crime prevention and community safety measures. The main policy ideas and instruments associated with this trend have spread widely in Western countries. This article examines the Swedish national crime prevention policy. As Sweden is a welfare society with a long tradition of social crime prevention, it is of great interest to explore to what extent the aforementioned trend has influenced its crime prevention policy. We do this by examining Sweden's national policy and how its concepts have spread to the local level—specifically, to municipalities and their local crime prevention councils. We find that there has been a preventive shift in Sweden, although not as far-reaching as in many other European countries. Substantial changes have occurred in the understanding and direction of crime prevention work, and the question is to what extent this development will continue.     

Hybrid Actors,Tactical Variety: Rethinking Asymmetric and Hybrid War

Wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan should be understood as hybrid wars, wars in which elements of ethnic or tribal conflict, ideologically based insurgency, factional squabbling, and organized crime are inextricably intertwined, with the same actors playing multiple and partially conflicting roles. Hybrid war is inherently transnational, featuring transnational crime networks, “migrant warriors,” transnational diaspora links, legitimate international trade, and foreign intervention. It takes place in hybridized states reliant on local warlords and other actors whose power prevents effective state-building. In this context, while counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes appropriate military strategy and tactics, the core problem is more political than military. Since a hybridized client state is not likely to be politically reformable even if a foreign ally achieves military success, outside allies like the United States should generally refrain from boots-on-the-ground intervention, pursuing instead a diplomatic solution, even though such a deal is likely to be unpalatable.     

Aid as an encounter at the interface: the complexity of the global fight against poverty

International development discourse has recently shifted its focus from top‐down economic adjustment to participative anti‐poverty policy. This shift hints at an acknowledgement of the local complexities within the poverty process and at a need to listen to and develop actions with the ‘poor’. But, whereas the mainstream argument remains couched in a technical framework, we argue that the fight against poverty is inevitably political. Conceptualising the aid industry as a set of global–local interfaces, it follows that a closer look at ‘participation’ in anti‐poverty interventions is needed to come to grips with the political issues involved. Four issues are discussed: the complexity of local ‘participation’, given the ‘polycephalous’ character of third world societies; the power biases in the aid chain; the potential problem of ‘false consciousness’; and the ambiguities of the role of local development brokers. We conclude that anti‐poverty policy is in need of ‘interface experts’, who, through ‘provocation’ can beget ‘participation’.     

Automatic Gait Recognition and its Potential Role in Counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

Closed-circuit television footage can be used to assemble an often-complex picture of an incident and aid in the identification of suspects after a crime or terrorist attack has occurred. For example, such footage allowed the police to not only identify the 7/7 London bombers but also to piece together the details of the bombers' movements prior to the attack. In the case of the London bombers little attempt was made to disguise their identities but where such identities are concealed it is possible to identify suspects based on other unique biometric characteristics such as the style of walk, referred to as gait. Gait feature–based individual identification has received increased attention from biometrics researchers. In this article, we propose a novel gait biometric methodology that could contribute to the counterterrorism effort and the identification of individuals involved in crime.     

Beyond crisis management? The role of Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity in humanitarian aid: the case of Lesvos

Abstract

In recent years, what has been called citizen initiatives for global solidarity (CIGS) have grown considerably in numbers across Europe and beyond. Lately, CIGS have also received attention as they are responding to humanitarian crisis across the world. In Europe during 2015, citizens were heavily involved in catering for incoming refugees, putting up loosely organised voluntary-based initiatives. CIGS popped up in places such as Lesvos, which is the focus of our research. Humanitarian CIGS are quick in their response to needs on the ground, are quickly governed by rules and regulations as well as overall ideas about crisis management, and come to work either with or in opposition to other actors. We examine two examples of CIGS positioned at the margins of the humanitarian aid machinery in Lesvos. Through a lens of power and resistance, we discuss how they resisted paradigmatic ideas of crisis management and instead called for a different interpretation of how to think about and do crisis management.     

Governance,Representation and International Aid

The growth of the postwar 20th century international aid architecture has generated much debate over the successes and failures of aid, its changing forms and its challenges. This article uses this aid landscape to explore the representational or discursive power and authority of the aid donor over the aid recipient. It suggests that representations about what aid does, its modalities and dispensations reproduce a hegemonic discourse and that representational authority in diagnosing aid’s problems and prescribing solutions resides generally on one side of the aid binary. It thus focuses on the hierarchical or asymmetric relations of power implied by such a binary, on the way development aid in particular has come to shape self-understandings of donors in relation to recipients, and on the discursive labour that enables such a construction. It also explores how the post-Washington consensus on poverty eradication has embedded neoliberal solutions to development. The reproduction of the hegemonic aid discourse is examined in reference to NGOs involved in the dispensing of aid in Southeast Asia by drawing on scholarly literature and field research in Southeast Asia and Washington DC.     

Crime,Irregular Warfare,and Institutional Failure in Latin America: Guatemala as a Case Study

This article examines the current crisis in Guatemala as a case study in the phenomenon of “criminal insurgency” in Latin America. Since the close of Guatemala's civil war in 1996, crime—especially violent crime—has increased dramatically, to the point that drug traffickers, organized crime syndicates, and youth gangs are effectively waging a form of irregular warfare against the state. The police, the judiciary, and entire local and departmental governments are rife with criminal infiltrators; murder statistics have surpassed civil-war levels in recent years; criminal operatives assassinate government officials and troublesome members of the political class; and chunks of territory are now effectively under the control of criminal groups. All this has led to growing civic disillusion and eroded the authority and legitimacy of the government. Rampant crime is causing a crisis of the democratic state.     

Co-opting Good Governance Reform: The Rise of a Not-so-Reformist Leader in Kebumen,Central Java

Challenging the existing literature, which tends to downplay the impact of good governance reform in post-Suharto Indonesia, the article suggests that greater intervention by international donors, combined with the process of decentralisation, has influenced the dynamics of political competition at the local level. It suggests that the increasing availability of international aid has provided local elites with an option to engage in a new form of patronage politics that relies less on old instruments, such as money politics and violence. By selectively committing themselves to good governance reform, Indonesian local elites can now seek a new source of power in the form of support from international donors, with which they can raise their profiles as ‘reformists’ and consolidate power, only to engage in familiar, if less blatant, forms of patronage politics. The article highlights such a dimension of local politics with reference to the case of Kebumen's former regent, Rustriningsih.     

Aid and state-building,Part I: South Korea and Taiwan

Under what conditions does foreign aid in the aftermath of war foster state-building? This article argues that institutional legacy and continuity and the politics of aid may matter. In the aftermath of war, for an aid regime to reinforce state-building, it may need to ensure continuity in the strength of the state and to use recipient mechanisms and finance policies that generate a greater state capacity. The existence and continuity of a Weberian state may increase the likelihood of effective state-building. If the state is relatively strong, with a Weberian bureaucracy, aid can further reinforce it when aid is spent through national systems or is aligned with local priorities, with efforts to ensure that the recipient leaders reinforce state effectiveness by implementing policies that may require greater state capacity. Evidence for this argument is provided through pairwise comparison of state-building patterns between South Korea and Taiwan.     

Why did CPSU reform fail? The 28th Party Congress Reconsidered

This article considers the reasons for the failure to reform the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which was central to the Soviet collapse. Using a wide range of party and other archives, it challenges the conventional view that power was concentrated in the hands of a very conservative party apparat that was able to frustrate any attempt at reform. Focusing on the issue of party renewal at the 28th Party Congress of 1990, it argues that party reformers, including many party secretaries, made serious efforts to change a hierarchically organised vanguard party into a social democratic one at about this time. Their eventual failure was due more than anything else to the reformers' lack of an organised movement and Gorbachev's indecisiveness.     

State and local finance in a command economy: the case of the soviet union

Two aspects of Western public finance, the economic theory of federalism and public choice theory, have insights that, if adopted in the Soviet Union, could help improve its resource allocation to permit economic growth, mitigate the problems it has with its minorities, and aid the transition away from a centralized, Communist-Party-dominated State and society. The economic reforms proposed by Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev are briefly summarized and criticized in the context of a summary discussion of governmental decisionmaking in the Soviet Union. Lessons are identified from the U.S. historical experience that suggest certain steps to improve local government as necessary preconditions for improving Soviet economic efficiency. These are free local elections, a free local press, an independent judiciary with real authority to protect the integrity of the press and local elections, real decentralization of political power to the regions, steps toward equalization of fiscal capacity among the regions, increased citizen mobility, and adoption of actions to provide incentives for Western investment in local government capital formation. This last precondition requires a convertible currency. (To achieve a convertable currency may require other economic and political changes that are beyond the scope of this paper.) Aspects of the paper rely on information publically available through mid-1989.     

Why Does Citizens' Knowledge of New Policy Vary Between Municipalities? The Case of the Social Support Act

Providing information to citizens is an important first step in the implementation of new policy. In this study we explain differences in the knowledge of citizens between municipalities of a newly introduced law in the Netherlands, the Social Support Act, 10 months after it became into force. This law is especially important for older people that need support in their daily functioning and participation. We focused on two aspects of knowledge related to the act, i.e. having heard of the new act, and knowing how voice with regard to policy on support is organised in the place of residence. Given that socialist local governments focus more on social topics than liberal local governments, we expected citizens of municipalities with socialist councils to have more knowledge about the new Social Support Act. Contrary to our expectations, citizens from municipalities where a liberal party or a collaboration of liberal/socialist parties is the largest, have a better understanding of how voice is organised. On the other hand, citizens in municipalities with an alderman from a combination of liberal/socialist parties have a lower chance of having heard of the Social Support Act. We argue that in view of the Social Support Act, the ideology of a local government related to citizens' responsibilities (liberal view) may have more influence on citizens' knowledge than being a government that pays attention to social issues (socialist view). As far as individual differences between citizens are concerned, as expected, older people that are more educated but in poorer health status have more knowledge about the new act. A higher educational level and an excellent mental health status are related to more knowledge about voice. Educational level is the most powerful predictor for knowledge about the act.     

Third World Military Spending

This article critically examines the concept of 'partnership', ubiquitous in contemporary development aid discourses. It investigates whether the language of 'partnership' signifies a change in aid relations away from the stark exertion of power characteristic of the conditionality decades of the 1980s and 1990s, or, conversely, whether 'partnership' is merely the latest guise behind which power-based relations continue to operate. A conceptual framework facilitates the deconstruction of the recently established 'Partnership for Governance Reform' in Indonesia, posited as a co-operative venture between national stakeholders and the international community. Elements of partnership or of power are sought through an examination of decision-making structures and activities. Findings are of the largely rhetorical and instrumental use of 'partnership' by international actors. Although there is nominal control by Indonesian actors, decision-making bodies are constructed in a manner which ensures that the reform agenda of international agencies remains relatively unchallenged, both in terms of what is included and excluded. Contrary to the official discourse of partnership as encouraging locally formulated reform strategies, the notions of 'partnership' and 'local ownership' simultaneously disguise and legitimise the interventions of international agencies in domestic reform processes, serving to mystify power asymmetry.     

Feature review Corruption eruption: Development and the international community

Abstract

‘Tied’ or ‘in-kind’ international food aid has been criticised as an implicit form of export subsidy that governments use to circumvent export subsidy restrictions. In addition to displacing agricultural exports, food aid is less efficient than untied aid and depresses local agricultural production in recipient countries. I argue that tied food aid is not protected by the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and could consequently be challenged under the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism as a prohibited or actionable subsidy contrary to the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (scm) Agreement. As the USA is both the largest donor of international food aid and most consistently ties its food aid to domestic agricultural producers, this paper focuses on US policy to describe the challenge that might be advanced under the scm Agreement.     

Qatar’s humanitarian aid to Palestine

The purpose of this paper is to document Qatar’s recent contribution of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. We consider Qatar as an example of a mini state that relies on its wealth and soft power to further its interests in the Middle East and support a beleaguered Arab-Muslim state. The paper carries out analysis of Arabic newspapers and other documentary evidence to contextualise and estimate Qatar’s financial contribution 2010–2016. Contextualising Qatar’s aid necessitates considering Israel’s military control of the Palestinian Territories, and its ability through hard power to regulate the inflow of aid to Palestine. The paper concludes by calling for adopting the political economy perspective in dealing with humanitarian aid.