Case note: a first experience with sea reporting

The City of Boca Raton, Florida has begun experimentation with Service Efforts and Accomplishments reporting. Sanitation was the focus because the department had been selected to participate in the City's detailed operations review for the annual reporting period. This paper describes the City's project, discusses the impact, and identifies lessons learned through the City's first attempt at SEA reporting. Although challenging, the City considers this initial effort a success and plans to continue experimentation.     

The impact of leader turnover on the onset and the resolution of WTO disputes

When national leaders are replaced, the incoming leader often represents different interests to those of his predecessor. Such shifts in national priorities affect both the onset of WTO disputes and the resolution of ongoing disputes. In particular, leader turnover increases the likelihood that a nation will be involved in a WTO dispute as either plaintiff or defendant, and, if a dispute is ongoing, then leader change in a defendant state increases the likelihood of significant concessions by the defendant. The impact of leader change on both the initiation and settlement of disputes is greater in non-democratic states than democratic states.     

Unusual results due to transfused blood.

During a murder enquiry, the forensic science investigation used PGM and EAP blood grouping systems and detected a mixture of blood on the deceased's jacket. The blood groups matched those of the deceased and accused. The results of DNA analysis, however, proved that only a single source of DNA, matching the deceased, was present. Supplementary information relating to the transfusion of the individual whilst still wearing his clothing led the authors to conclude that a mixture of transfused blood and the individual's own blood had effused from his body via a stab wound, and onto his clothing.     

State Visits and Leader Survival

Why do political leaders travel abroad? In this article, we propose an informational mechanism linking in‐person diplomacy to leader survival. A foreign power visits an incumbent in order to reap a future policy concession; the visit is only worth the effort if the incumbent remains in power long enough to deliver on the deal. A diplomatic visit thus provides a visible and credible signal of the visitor's high confidence in the incumbent's stability in office. Domestic opponents, facing incomplete information as to the incumbent's strength, observe the signal and are deterred from mounting a challenge. Using data on U.S. diplomatic visits from 1960 to 2013, we find strong empirical support for our predictions: A visit with the U.S. president substantially reduces the risk of a leader's removal from office.     

Suspect burial excavation procedure: A cautionary tale

Geographic location, time of reporting and need for rapid evaluation contributed to a lack of intelligence concerning a suspect burial site in scrub woodland (～15 km from the last known location of a missing person) in Northern Ireland. Police received reports of a subsiding ‘grave’, which was evaluated positively using GPR and victim recovery dogs (VRD). After 24 h work, archaeological excavation showed a vertical-sided, stepped excavation on undisturbed clay with no inhumation. Subsequent research showed the feature to be an engineering trial pit. The GPR response was a water table and rocks, VRD were possibly reacting to disturbed ground. The work serves as a demonstration of good archaeological practice in suspect burial excavation, following a lack of landscape evaluation and poor overall intelligence.     

‘A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence’: Agamben and Adorno on Gesture

In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben’s essays on gesture, and the loss of gesture, in relation to Theodor Adorno’s account of gesture given in his work on Kafka. I argue that both share an account of gesture as an involuntary, yet non-intentional figure of a generalised destruction of experience. However, in their respective accounts of an emphatic possibility that can be located in the loss of gesture, Agamben and Adorno move in fundamentally different philosophical directions. For Agamben, the loss of gesture opens up the possibility of a space of existing within the pure possibility of speaking itself. For Adorno, the loss of gesture returns us to a reified embodiment that can nevertheless image the possibility of a different way of relating to materiality. I argue that, in the attempt to immanently construct forms of resistance within a generalised destruction of experience, Agamben’s articulation of an absolute gesturality tends towards an immuring of the subject within the repetitive space of what Adorno terms ‘objectless inwardness’. Although Adorno’s account of gesture and its relation to metaphysics and politics is equally problematic in many ways, I argue that his account of a metaphysical experience that appears within alienated gestures offers the possibility for moving beyond the destruction of experience.     

Victims Speak: Comparing Child Sexual Abusers' and Child Victims' Accounts, Perceptions, and Interpretations of Sexual Abuse

This article presents findings from a longitudinal study¹ that sought to evaluate a treatment program for child sexual abusers. A triangulated methodological approach was adopted drawing upon quantitative and qualitative methodological techniques. The focus here is upon one element of this research.² Ninety-one in-depth interviews were conducted over a four-year period with a small, nonrandom sample of twenty-one male offenders who had been convicted of sexual offenses against children. All of the men were subject to probation orders with a psychiatric condition (Criminal Justice Act, 1991). One of the aims of this element of the research was to explore the extent to which evidence of denial could be found in offenders' accounts of offense circumstance and also to explore the extent to which offenders minimized the nature and extent of abuse perpetrated. Offenders' accounts of offense circumstances were compared to victim statements, and stark differences emerge. These findings have considerable implications for treatment practice with sex offenders, where victims' perceptions could be used to directly confront offender denial and minimization.     

Reviews

Pekka Sutela, Economic Thought and Economic Reform in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 197 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Stephen White, Gorbachev and After. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, ix+310 pp., £27.95 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

Catherine Merridale & Chris Ward, eds, Perestroika. The Historical Perspective. London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1991, xiii+253 pp., £12.95 p/b.

Guy Standing, ed., The New Soviet Labour Market. In Search of Flexibility. Geneva: ILO, 1991, xiv+440 pp., SF45.00.

Leonard Geron, Soviet Foreign Economic Policy under Perestroika. London: Chatham House Papers, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Pinter Publishers, 1990, 126 pp., £19.50, h/b, £7.95 p/b.

Malcolm R. Hill, Soviet Advanced Manufacturing Technology and Western Export Controls. Aldershot: Avebury, 1991, xv+256 pp., £35.00.

Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post‐Stalinist Society, translated by K. and O. Forster. Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, xvii+483 pp., £22.50 p/b.

A. Kemp‐Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia 1928–39. London: Macmillan, 1991, vi + 338 pp., £45.00.

Jelena Milojkovic‐Djuric, Aspects of Soviet Culture: Voices of glasnosf, 1960–1990. New York: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1991, iv+190 pp., $29.00.

Landon Pearson, Children of Glasnost. Growing up Soviet. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1991, xv+505 pp., $16.95, p/b.

Robert Rand, Comrade Lawyer. Inside Soviet Justice in an Era of Reform. Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, x+166 pp., £9.50 p/b.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch & Richard Stites, eds, Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991, viii+344 pp., £22.50 h/b, £9.50 p/b.

Efraim Karsh, Soviet Policy towards Syria since 1970. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991, 229 pp.+index, £35.00.

Ronald D. Bachman, ed., Romania: A Country Study, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: US Library of Congress Federal Research Division, 1991, xxxvi+356 pp.