Managing Value Conflicts in Public Innovation: Ostrich,Chameleon, and Dolphin Strategies

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a theoretical understanding of the management of value conflicts in public innovation. Drawing from the literatures on public values and on public innovation, various strategic approaches to managing conflict are discussed, conceptualized, and applied to two cases. The paper identifies three basic approaches for dealing with value conflicts: avoidance (ostrich strategy), coping (chameleon strategy) and learning (dolphin strategy). This model is used to analyze two technological innovation processes in the Netherlands, showing its value for empirical research. The paper concludes that continued high-level deliberation can impede innovation processes while local experimenting may support learning about value conflicts.     

Diaspora Mobilization for Western Military Intervention During the Arab Spring

ABSTRACT

Literature on diaspora interest groups suggests that they exacerbate home-country conflicts by lobbying for hawkish interventions. However, studies fall short of understanding why diasporas support militarized interventions in home-country conflicts. Using original data on Libyan and Syrian pro-revolution activism during the Arab Spring, I demonstrate that extreme escalations in state repression, activists’ transnational ties, and norms supporting the “responsibility to protect” produced perceptions that militarized interventions were necessary countermeasures to mass killings. Overall, analyses of diasporas’ orientations to home-country conflicts should account for annihilative threats to populations at home, diasporas’ relations with those on the ground, and humanitarian intervention norms.     

Youth perceptions of violence in Western Honduras

Abstract

Youth violence is a growing challenge worldwide, particularly in countries that are experiencing extreme social disorganisation. This is exemplified in Honduras which has been one of the top five countries in the world for intentional homicides for over 20 years. While many studies have examined youth violence in urban cities, few have researched youth violence in rural zones. This study presents a case study using social disorganisation theory to investigate the perceptions of 40 youth in rural and peri-urban Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras, regarding what drives violence and the potential solutions. Consistent with social disorganisation theory, our results demonstrate that youth view violence as an opportunity pathway resulting from economic deprivation, disruptions to the family and neighbourhood, lack of or poorly functioning external agencies and conflicting moral values. There are significant gender differences in the results, with young men pointing to several issues that challenge masculine hegemonic gender norms such as the desire for love and belonging, participation in education and the role of policing.     

Child marriage,human rights and international norms: the case of legislative reform in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force in 1990. It condemns child marriage, violence and discrimination against children and enjoins tutelage for their education and health. Implementing such principles in national legislation sometimes conflicts with local norms relating to respect for cultural and religious traditions. This was the case of Trinidad and Tobago, a multicultural and multi-religious society that legally sanctioned child marriage until 2017. The paper makes two unique contributions to the literature. First, using the literature on child marriage and the obligations under international conventions, the paper creates a child marriage conceptual framework with the main normative positions on child marriage. Second, using the framework, it explores the normative motivations underlying the domestic legal reform debates held in parliament between 2015–2017. The paper uses the conceptual framework to explain the transformations in the traditional positions of local religious and ethnic groups, provides evidence of norm penetration from the international to a local multicultural setting and furthers the literature on international human rights norm penetration and contestation.     

Developing a Model Intervention to Prevent Abuse in Relationships Among Caribbean and Caribbean-American Youth by Partnering with Schools

SUMMARY

This paper proposes a model intervention to prevent relationship abuse among Caribbean and Caribbean-American adolescents. Specifically, the model partners with a high school with a strong Caribbean student population and incorporates education, prevention and intervention, as the three core components. This paper highlights the importance of working with young people in a school setting, working with young people before they have fully tackled the developmental task of defining norms of and values in relationships, utilizing culturally competent staff and specialized programming, and emphasizing the need for early intervention in the instances of adolescent relationship violence before its evolution into adult domestic violence. The model proposed serves as an outline for further development of culturally-specific and competent interventions to prevent and address relationship violence among adolescents.     

Colonial legacies,armed revolts and state violence: the Maoist movement in India

Abstract

This article examines the connected histories of armed tribal and peasant revolts in colonial and postcolonial India with reference to the ongoing Maoist conflict in rural and tribal areas of central and eastern India. The article makes two interrelated arguments about the violent continuities that endure from colonial to postcolonial contexts: (1) the nation-state system, in its efforts to establish control and influence, creates a hierarchy of citizenship engaging in the hostile policing of marginalised subjects, thereby engendering armed revolts and political violence; (2) the postcolonial state’s response to these armed revolts by marginalised subjects who challenge its sovereignty and monopoly over violence, is equally violent and repressive. Most significantly, the state’s response is legitimised in the same colonial idioms and justifications that mark epistemic and physical violence against the third world.     

What Generates,Constitutes and Causes Opportunity-driven Violence? The Case of West Kalimantan

Abstract

This article uses the example of West Kalimantan to show some new ways of studying opportunities for violence, contributing especially to the so-called ‘sons of the soil’ conflict debate. By showing that the opportunity structure in West Kalimantan was not primarily material, but social, related to ways to circumvent fear of and norms against violence, this article attempts to update the theoretical premises of the traditional security studies approach to obstacles to conflict and opportunities for violence. The intention is to show how socially constructed realities are relevant in offering and denying opportunities for violence, and how the study of the meanings of actions reveals ways in which opportunities for violent demonstrative argumentation are born in local conflict discourses. The case study shows how powerful narratives enable the justification of violent action and how identities and violent policies mutually constitute each other. This way the empirical evidence calls for understanding the generative and constitutive sources of violence, which are not simply mechanistic causes of conflict.     

The violence work of transnational gangs in Central America

Abstract

According to international relations scholars, an important change taking place in the post-Cold War context concerns the lethality of non-state armed groups (NSAGs). Underlying this observation is the conventional assumption that non-state violence is intrinsically illegitimate. This article shifts the analysis of violence away from the terrain of legitimacy, which tends to moralise the difference between state and non-state forces, and towards the terrain of work, where their violence features as part and not separate from a shared political economy. I propose the notion of violence work as a resourceful analytic into the dialectics of everyday violence and the complex processes of value production in social life. Against the background of the extreme cruelty attributed to transnational gangs in Central America, I argue that their violence work is expressive of prevailing modes of accumulating wealth in the region. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I show how gang violence work animates a system of economic cooperation that engages a wide array of subjects who traverse state/non-state and legal/illegal divides.     

The Changing Security Agenda in Southeast Asia: Globalization,New Terror,and the Delusions of Regionalism

One of the distinguishing features of international terrorism the past fifteen years has been the resurgence and proliferation of terrorist groups motivated by a religious imperative. Such groups are far more lethal than their secular counterparts, regarding violence as a divine duty or sacramental act conveyed by sacred text and imparted by clerical authority. Moreover, religious terrorism is not restricted to Islamic terrorist groups exclusively in the Middle East. The same characteristics—the legitimization of violence based on religious precepts, the sense of profound alienation and isolation, and the attendant preoccupation with the elimination of a broadly defined category of “enemies”—are also apparent among American Christian white supremacists, among some radical Jewish messianic terrorist movements in Israel, and among radical Sikh movements in India. Finally, as many of these groups embrace strong millennialist or apocalyptic beliefs, we may be on the cusp of a new and potentially more dangerous era of terrorism as the year 2000—the literal millennium—approaches.     

France faced with terrorism

Abstract

France is an interesting laboratory for studying terrorism, or antiterrorism, not because extreme violence has been committed on a large scale as in Lebanon, but because, faced with diverse terrorist actions over a short period, France has worked out and considerably modified a policy for dealing with terrorism. The subject herein is not terrorism but the official response to it, namely counterterrorist policy and actions.     

The relation between terrorism and domestic civil disorders

Abstract

Students of civil disorder in the United States look to such events for signs of an incipient tradition in the growth of urban terrorism, but the relation between these two forms of collective violence remains unclear. By examining the evolution of civil violence in New York City for nearly three hundred years, one gains a better grasp of the historically conservative nature of collective violence in this country and the conditions under which it could change into a more threatening tradition of political terrorism.     

Five Areas of Value Judgement in Local Adaptation to Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change has generated several new theoretical and policy challenges, many of which concern how local communities ought to adapt to a warmer climate. This paper identifies and analyses a number of value judgements that come to the fore as local authorities adapt to climate change. Five categories of judgements are discussed: evaluation (how should the consequences of adaptation be evaluated?), timing (when should adaptive action be taken?), distribution (how should the benefits and burdens of adaptation be distributed?), procedures (who should be involved in adaptation decision making?), and goal conflicts (how should goal conflicts in adaptation be dealt with?). For each category, further research is needed to assist decision making at the local level.     

Boko Haram,bandits and slave-raiders: identities and violence in a Central African borderland

ABSTRACT

Boko Haram is a religiously motivated insurgency with a complex history in Nigeria and origins in urban Maiduguri. Through most of its existence Boko Haram has shown an affinity for border regions: the frontier zones between Nigeria and Niger, the Mandara Mountains on the border with Cameroon, and the shorelines and islands of Lake Chad. This paper argues that this is an historically mediated process. Boko Haram as a borderland phenomenon echoes the hijra of Usman dan Fodio, but also structured forms of violence and wealth creation that have historically united elites and their followers in the region. Moreover, there are continuities between the actions and actors associated with earlier phases of border violence and processes involving Boko Haram today. This suggests that Boko Haram will not be “defeated,” but rather that the region will see a reversion to forms of border violence that were prevalent as recently as the early 2000s.     

Political violence in pre‐coup Turkey

Abstract

The long‐standing and pervasive patterns of political violence in Turkey, which were only abated by the military coup of September 1980, are examined in terms of their historical and sociopolitical antecedents. The paper concludes that political violence in Turkey is the result on the one hand of the specific forms of Kemalist modernization to which the country was subjected from 1920 to 1945. Kemalism led to modern political and legal institutions, but left much of Turkey's cultural and economic life subject to traditional values. In addition, Kemalism bequeathed a legacy of political parties that saw the national good identified solely with each political organization's success, which in turn subjectively legitimized violence against political opponents as acceptable in the struggle for the national welfare. After 1945 the legacy of Kemalism was joined by severe developmental problems in the area of economics and social welfare, a resurgence of hyper‐nationalism over the Cyprus issue, and an anti‐modernist backlash through a revival of Islamic traditions. The results were conflicts in a society already strained by the symptoms of second stage modernization that could not be compromised within the parameters of the Turkish political system.     

Creating capacities for peacebuilding citizenship: history and social studies curricula in Bangladesh,Canada, Colombia,and México

Public education is one influence on how young people learn to navigate social conflicts and to contribute to building democratic peace, including their sense of hope or powerlessness. Social studies curricula, in particular, introduce core concerns, geographies, governance and civil society, and participation skills and norms. History education narratives frame identity, (dis)trust or peaceful coexistence, and provide exemplars of how social conflicts and injustice have been handled in the past. To shed light on these peacebuilding and peace-blocking choices, this paper examines government-sanctioned social studies and history curricula in contrasting contexts of violent conflict and peace: Bangladesh, Colombia, México, and (Ontario) Canada. Our comparative analysis shows how these official curricula (de)normalize violence and militarism, present national identities as hegemonic/exclusive or plural/inclusive, and create opportunities for teaching/learning peacebuilding citizenship competencies such as conflict dialog, human rights awareness, and engagement in collective processes of civil society and governance.     

The Limits of Governance: How Far Does Policy Analysis Travel in International Relations?

ABSTRACT

This article retraces the mutual rapprochement between Policy Analysis and International Relations and addresses its limits. Looking beyond the circle of advanced liberal-democratic economies, three limits are discussed: the need to specify the prerequisites of different modes of governance; to consider the relations of power and domination in these processes; and to look beyond regulatory issues at the political and societal conflicts surrounding policy diffusion.     

Chapter 10. Central American Survivors of Political Violence

Abstract

Despite compelling, well-documented findings on the levels of stress and trauma among Central American refugees, this group continues to be underserved. A host of issues contributes to this underservice, ranging from macro-level imposed obstacles, such as citizenship and health insurance as determining factors for accessing social and health services, to institutional factors that impede service utilization, such as an insufficient number of translators or a cumbersome and confusing bureaucracy. This chapter adopts a human rights framework as a strategy for working with groups of Central Americans who have experienced political violence. The ongoing effects of political violence on Central Americans, as they relate to mental and physical health problems, are reviewed and a case vignette is used to illustrate how political violence affects individuals and how macro-level forces and institutions create barriers to access and use of health care and social services. Treatment approaches for helping survivors of political violence in the context of a human rights framework are suggested.     

Female Autonomy,Social Norms and Intimate Partner Violence against Women in Turkey

The theoretical literature asserts that intimate partner violence against women stems from inequalities within the relationship, and it strengthens both male power and control, and female subordination. Using Structural Equation Modelling, this paper addresses the two-way relationship between intimate partner violence and female autonomy in Turkey. Consistent with the theory, we find that (1) violence has a significant and negative effect on female autonomy; and (2) the incidence of violence decreases with the level of female autonomy. We also find that intimate partner violence is an increasing function of the strength of men’s commitment to social norms upholding traditional gender roles.     

Online as the New Frontline: Affect,Gender, and ISIS-Take-Down on Social Media

ABSTRACT

Using a dataset of more than 80 accounts during 2015, this article explores the gendered ways in which self-proclaiming Twitter Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) supporters construct community around “suspension.” The article argues that suspension is an integral event in the online lives of ISIS supporters, which is reproduced in online identities. The highly gendered roles of ISIS males and females frame responses to suspension, enforcing norms that benefit the group: the shaming of men into battle and policing of women into modesty. Both male and female members of “Wilayat Twitter” regard online as a frontline, with suspension an act of war against the “baqiya family.” The findings have implications for broader repressive measures against ISIS online.     

Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women,motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACT

This article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.