Peace-building in Haiti: the case for vertical integration

In light of growing attention to grassroots and community-based approaches to peace-building, this paper explores this ‘local turn’ through an examination of ongoing efforts to address community-based insecurity in the urban slums of Port-au-Prince. In recent years, these communities have been the site of an ongoing series of experiments, involving a range of different actors, aimed at reclaiming them from armed gangs. However, the fragmented nature of these interventions and the range of different strategies deployed, from enforcement to inducement to engagement, have limited their overall impact. Drawing on a distinction between horizontally- and vertically-integrated peace-building, as well as on recent insights about the centrality of state-society relations in peace-building processes, we make a case for greater coherence and co-ordination between bottom-up community violence reduction efforts and top-down police reform. In the particular case of Haiti, we suggest that renewed interest in community policing may provide one platform through which a more vertically-integrated form of peace-building, one which connects community-level agency with wider, structural-level reform processes, might emerge.     

The Difference Law Makes: Domestic Atrocity Laws and Human Rights Prosecutions

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely been unexamined. That is surprising given that international legal prohibitions against human rights atrocities are designed to be enforced by domestic courts applying domestic criminal law. We argue that domestic criminal laws against genocide and crimes against humanity facilitate human rights prosecutions in post‐authoritarian states by helping to overcome formal legal roadblocks to prosecution, such as retroactivity, amnesties, immunities, and statutes of limitations. Using original data on domestic atrocity laws and human rights prosecutions in new democracies, we find that atrocity laws increase the speed with which new democracies pursue prosecutions, as well as the overall numbers of trials they initiate and complete.     

Decades of Disillusion: Reappraising the ALP-ACTU Accord 1983–1996

In this article we review the Accord between the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), in order to address current uncertainty over the role of unions in politics, particularly in the face of both the Coalition Government's 2006 industrial relations legislation and the ALP's apparent repudiation of the country's longstanding institutional leverage over wages and non-wage policies. The Accord exemplified an explicitly corporatist union strategy and it initially attracted extensive and hostile commentary. However, discussion of the experiment, together with other tripartite approaches to policy formation, has waned in recent years, perhaps suggesting that it was a tactic whose time has passed. Reviewing some major criticisms, we argue that critics have dismissed the Accord too hastily. Although serious problems with the Accord process are acknowledged, the articulation of a broad program of social democratic initiatives is always likely to retain support on the political left. Despite changes in union density and workforce composition, the union movement still possesses capacity to mobilise community support and develop a principled program.     

The Mexico Declaration and Plan of Action: Reaffirming Latin America's Generous Tradition of Asylum and Innovative Solutions

The ‘Foreword to the Mexico Declaration and Plan of Action’written by Philippe Lavanchy, Director of the Americas Bureauat UNHCR, should have appeared in Volume 17:4 and should stillbe read with the documents there. In late 2005, UNHCR sent alarge set of materials relating to the Americas, but, due toannual page limits for the IJRL, they had to be split across17:4 and 18:1. For     

From consultation to participatory governance? A critical review of citizen engagement strategies in Queensland

This article explores what appears to be a major shift in the policies and practices of national and international governments–the increased attention to, and use of, citizen engagement strategies as a basis for developing more participatory forms of governance. The article examines recent citizen engagement initiatives of the Queensland state government which have grappled with these complex political, policy and service concerns. The potential innovation and effectiveness of citizen engagement techniques and approaches are examined. The limitations of technical methodologies based on a traditional consultative framework are highlighted. The article analyses the relationship between these citizen engagement practices and more strategic democratic reforms based on notions of participatory governance.     

Public affairs in Australia: Evolving and enhancing corporate performance

This article is an attempt to provide a helicopter view of the influences and responses that have shaped the corporate public affairs function over four decades from non‐existence to an important and settled profession in Australia's major companies. It reflects the perceptions and experiences of an observer with a background in public administration, politics, academia, industry association leadership, and consulting to companies and industry organisations over that period. They are further informed by surveys and other studies conducted by the organisation supporting public affairs departments, the Australian Centre for Corporate Public Affairs (the Centre) since its inception in 1990. The article charts the emergence from two distinct, low level management silos—one supporting communications and the other, government affairs—to create an integrated strategic management function. The central story is of waves of innovation in concepts and practices, developed mainly overseas, being embraced with enthusiasm and becoming a dominant focus, before settling into the broad toolbox of public affairs. This occurred particularly in the period 1990–2005 during which the function took its shape. With such a broad and ambitious sweep, it is inevitable that bold generalisations begging exceptions must be made.     

Prisoners and escapees: improving the institutional responsibility square in Bangladesh

The article argues that explanations of problematic governance are institutional rather than organizational and have their roots in the deep structures of society. Bangladesh is used as an exemplar for such analysis, deploying the notion of the institutional responsibility square comprising four institutional domains of state, market, community and household. A prior or ‘total institution’ metaphor is used to describe the ways in which different classes are obliged to pursue their livelihoods, entrapped within the problematic social embeddedness of these four institutional domains. The article develops this argument via three themes: permeability between these domains (i.e., blurred moral boundaries between public and private behaviour); problem of legitimation of public institutions, given this permeability; and the incorporated rather than independent characteristics of civil society, thus limiting optimism about its potential to create reform. Nevertheless the article offers a strategic agenda of institutional improvement (i.e., escape from the prison) based on the principles of shifting people's rights from the problematic, uncertain informal sphere towards the formal realm. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.