Missing revolution: the American intelligence failure in Iraq, 1958

Why were American officials caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution in Iraq on 14 July 1958? Drawing on American intelligence and diplomatic records as well as multilingual sources, this article argues that the US intelligence failure is the product of two factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence in Iraq’s ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments. It revisits America’s intelligence failure in Iraq and suggests important lessons for the study of intelligence.     

Missing in action: practice,paralegality, and the nature of immigration enforcement

U.S. immigration control is typically understood in terms of enforcement practices undertaken by federal officers guided by legislation and court decisions. While legislation and court opinions are important components of the immigration control apparatus, they do not adequately account for immigration control ‘on the ground.’ To explore this problem, we advance the concept of paralegality, the practices and operations that constitute a dynamic system of actions and relationships that are not simply linear applications of legislation or judicial decisions but may in fact extend or counter these texts. We illustrate the importance of paralegality by reconstructing the evolution of the §287(g) and Secure Communities programs, both of which have shape-shifted dramatically since their inception. Our account of immigration control highlights the problem practice poses for law, proposes a theoretical alternative to textual-law-centric research on immigration and law enforcement, and contributes to scholarship on everyday citizenship.     

Implementing Public Utility Commission Web Sites: Targeting Audiences, Missing Opportunities

Research demonstrates that some government agencies are more accomplished than others when it comes to e-government. More generally, various scholars suggest that e-government is moving forward at a relatively slow pace, especially in relation to the sophistication of government Web sites. With these issues in mind, this research utilized interviews with state public utility commission staff members to explore their agencies' experiences with staffing, funding, coordinating, and prioritizing their e-government efforts, particularly their Web site activities. Assessing such efforts in both quantitative and qualitative terms, this research found that a mix of various factors, including financial resources, knowledgeable staff, and administrative oversight, related to better performance. Moreover, although public utility commissions have a clear mission to serve both consumers and regulated utilities, this research indicates that the commissions are focusing more of their e-government efforts on industry rather than citizens.     

Security: Missing from the Northern Ireland Model

The Northern Ireland model is best defined as the framing of the political endgame of Northern Ireland’s conflict culminating in the 1998 Belfast Agreement, otherwise known as the Good Friday Agreement. The Northern Ireland model is popularly portrayed as a negotiated settlement. It focuses primarily on the bargain reached by Northern Irish political parties, assisted by British and Irish governments and mediated by US senator George Mitchell. Academics and officials alike use it to explain how the “Troubles” ended and peace was achieved. Conspicuously absent from this model is security. It also grossly understates the difficulty in dealing with a modern insurgency (the Provisionals) and leans too heavily toward skewed post-conflict thinking that views insurgents as “peacemakers” prevented from making peace because of a manifestly poor security response, particularly that of the police force and its intelligence agency (Special Branch). The perspective of politicians and diplomats who brokered the peace settlement prioritizes political negotiations at the expense of the security response; in so doing, the role of security is undermined and overlooked. Most contemporary academic works promote this outlook. Excluding security, however, thwarts a comprehensive analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict and renders any examination partial and unrepresentative. There is therefore a significant intellectual gap in our understanding of how peace was achieved, which this article redresses. Ultimately, it questions the Northern Ireland model’s capacity to assist in other relevant conflict contexts in any practical sense by arguing that a strategy where security pushed as politics pulled brought about peace. In other words, security played a crucial part because it forced the main protagonists into a situation out of which the Belfast Agreement emerged.     

Missing pieces: an overview of the institutional puzzle

Institutional development has become a core component of international development programmes. Yet, institutional reforms have, to date, had a disappointing impact on poverty reduction in the South. The causality of the links between institutions and poverty reduction and how exactly the institutional environment and development outcomes affect each other is still unclear. A lack of analytical consensus has resulted in vague policy recommendations and a dearth of clear operational guidelines for international development practitioners. This article provides an overview of the main current institutional development debates and gaps in existing research, and identifies some key organisations working on institutional issues in the academic and practitioner spheres. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Astrosociology as the Missing Perspective

Astrosociology represents a distinctive emergent field within the sociological discipline and outside of it, inclusive of the other social sciences and a strong connection to the natural sciences. It provides a heretofore absent focus that partly serves to complement the work of space scientists and engineers, including the space policy issues that guide the direction of their work. By adopting astrosociology, this missing perspective increases the current scope of attention by adding its focus on the societal implications of human developments related to space generally and space exploration specifically. This relationship between space and society, viewed in both causal directions, influences social change within any particular society and possesses implications for future projects and missions. Astrosociology adds a sociocultural dimension to the conventional approach of space sciences that currently devalues a social science orientation. With the addition of astrosociology, practitioners of space will become exposed to decision-making criteria normally unavailable to them under current circumstances.     

Understanding the Political Economy of Cross-Strait Security: A Missing Link

This paper explores how and why China has been perceived as an economic threat in Taiwan through an examination of Taipei’s post-Cold War economic policy with respect to the mainland. While Taipei’s restriction on trade and investment across the Taiwan Strait until mid-2008 was widely considered a failure by both opponents and supporters of closer cross-Strait economic ties, this analysis points to an overlooked function of Taiwan’s economic policy that was not just about tackling the problems of the security externalities or promoting the island’s economic development. What appeared to be an ineffective policy can be understood as a successful boundary-drawing practice that discursively constituted a vulnerable Taiwan under Chinese economic threat, hence conducive to the (re)production of Taiwanese national identity.     

Fighting Amnesia: Ways to Uncover the Truth about Lebanon's Missing

¹After a 15-year conflict characterized by mass violations ofhuman rights, the Lebanese state and society have favored amnesiaover truth seeking. This has marginalized the victims, in particularthe relatives of thousands of missing or forcibly disappearedpersons. The 2007 decision by the UN Security Council to createa Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), tasked exclusively withtrying suspects in the assassination of former Prime MinisterRafik Hariri and other politically motivated assassinations,has fuelled perceptions of selective justice. This article outlinespossible strategies for taking advantage of changed circumstancesin Lebanon, including the future STL, in order to implementthe internationally guaranteed right to truth for families ofthe missing. The author examines recent regional practices and,drawing from the experiences of Morocco and Cyprus, argues thatgiven the strong constraints in Lebanon, the priority, at leastinitially, should be to establish the truth of what happenedand not the prosecution or even naming of culprits.     

Productivity: The Missing Link in Enterprise Bargaining for the NSW Police

The promised productivity gains of enterprise bargaining have yet to be realised by the NSW Police Service and its staff. This failure can be traced to a lack of understanding of workplace reform and productivity. Karpin (1995:3) forecast that improvement in management skills in Australia was required for growth. Enterprise bargaining demands increased productivity. Productivity demands performance management, which involves increased accountability with the establishment of practical performance indicators. As such, productivity and performance management are interrelated and require clear objectives (Directions in Government 1992a:26).     

Missing the Wake-up Call: Why Intelligence Failures Rarely Inspire Improved Performance

After major intelligence failures it is often asked why intelligence and security officials failed to heed the many ‘wake-up calls’ that had been provided by earlier failures and surprises. This article addresses this question by examining intelligence failures as ‘focusing events’, which is a concept used in the literature on government policy making to explain how disasters and crises can stimulate policy change and help organizations and decision-makers learn. It argues that in order for an intelligence failure such as a major terrorist attack to inspire improved intelligence performance – to be a true wake-up call – that failure must not only act as a focusing event to bring more attention to the threat, but it must also lead to increased intelligence collection and greater receptivity toward intelligence on the part of decision-makers.     

Measuring Municipal Borrowing Costs: How Missing Cost Information Biases Interest Rate Calculations

A substantial literature exists on federal tax expenditures, but almost no empirical research has been done on state tax expenditures. This article examines Michigan tax expenditures, with an emphasis on comparison to findings from the federal level. Three major topics are addressed: (1) allocation of resources by policy area, (2) distribution of tax expenditure benefits by income class, and (3) tax expenditure growth over time. Only the findings on resource allocation are consistent with findings from the federal level, suggesting that simple theories may be insufficient to systematically describe tax expenditures.     

Public Administrators' Trust in Citizens: A Missing Link in Citizen Involvement Efforts

An important but unattended consideration in citizen participation efforts is whether public officials trust citizens and, if not, whether they can formulate and implement policies that really engage, empower, and emancipate citizens. This study attempts to answer four questions: Is public officials' trust in citizens relevant and important? Is it a valid construct that can be differentiated from other constructs? What factors influence its level? And how does trust influence citizen involvement efforts? Based on a survey of 320 public administrators, the study finds that public administrators' trust in citizens is a relevant and valid construct and a predictor of proactive citizen involvement efforts. Public administrators generally have a neutral (neither trustful nor distrustful) view of citizens. Finally, factors affecting the level of trust are identified at the individual, organizational, and societal levels.     

Estimation and Inference Are Missing Data Problems: Unifying Social Science Statistics via Bayesian Simulation

Bayesian simulation is increasingly exploited in the socialsciences for estimation and inference of model parameters. Butan especially useful (if often overlooked) feature of Bayesiansimulation is that it can be used to estimate any function ofmodel parameters, including "auxiliary" quantities such as goodness-of-fitstatistics, predicted values, and residuals. Bayesian simulationtreats these quantities as if they were missing data, samplingfrom their implied posterior densities. Exploiting this principlealso lets researchers estimate models via Bayesian simulationwhere maximum-likelihood estimation would be intractable. Bayesiansimulation thus provides a unified solution for quantitativesocial science. I elaborate these ideas in a variety of contexts:these include generalized linear models for binary responsesusing data on bill cosponsorship recently reanalyzed in PoliticalAnalysis, item—response models for the measurement ofrespondent's levels of political information in public opinionsurveys, the estimation and analysis of legislators' ideal pointsfrom roll-call data, and outlier-resistant regression estimatesof incumbency advantage in U.S. Congressional elections     

Missing the Point on Hard and Soft Power?

This article is a critique of two reports of parliamentary inquiries, into intervention and soft power, respectively. Neither report includes any discussion of Britain's involvement in and culpability for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite a more radical approach taken by the report on soft power, the article argues that the failure to address recent wars is symptomatic of a deeper and more dangerous inability to face up to profound and dangerous changes taking place in the world.