Child rights and protection in slum settlements of Kampala,Uganda: A qualitative study

Child abuse and neglect are complex and polarizing issues in many low and middle income countries. We explore them through a situation analysis of child rights and protection in Uganda. A qualitative study, incorporating 10 focus group discussions (FGDs; N = 113) and 20 individual interviews was undertaken in Kampala, Uganda. Emerging themes were grouped into family and community-level factors; legal framework, structure and continuum of services, and human and financial resources. Violation of child rights was characterized by physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and exploitation; child neglect, homelessness, and child labor; dysfunctional families and abject poverty; and poor accommodation conditions; school drop-out due to economic hardship; early pregnancy, and social exclusion. Legal and regulatory factors included traditional harmful practices (including child sacrifice and witchcraft practices); forced marriage; and the perceived lack of the government's commitment to child protection. Without a strong legislation that protects children against abuse, promotes confidential reporting systems, and tackles domestic violence, children will still remain prone to various forms of abuses and exploitation.     

The Daily Mail and the Stephen Lawrence Murder

The Daily Mail's coverage of the 1993 race murder of Stephen Lawrence has been held up as an example of newspaper journalism at its best. It is a cause of pride to the paper, which has asserted that its 1997 front page accusing five men of the murder, and the comment and reporting that followed, brought about significant social and policy changes and helped achieve justice. The coverage has also been cited by the paper to rebut critics who accuse it of intolerance. Examined in detail here and set in their context, the paper's claims about its role in the case prove to be either exaggerated or not supported by evidence. The Mail's engagement in the Lawrence case involved a famous instance of editorial brilliance, but insofar as its campaign brought about or contributed to changes, they were not usually changes sought by the paper and they were sometimes contrary to its aims.     

A political ecology of socio-economic differentiation: debt,inputs and liberalization reforms in southwestern Burkina Faso

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresses two gaps in the agrarian change literature in relating how liberalization reforms and biophysical elements drive rural socio-economic differentiation. This work also shows that merging the concerns of political ecology with the agrarian change literature allows for a deeper examination of rural socio-economic differentiation.     

Results of a misspent youth: Joan Jett's performance of female masculinity

The article maps Joan Jett's performances from her days with the Runaways in the mid-1970s through her successful solo career in the 1980s to her recent affiliations with the riot grrrls in the 1990s. Unlike some critics, who, while acknowledging Jett's influence on generations of female rock performers, dismiss Jett as an inferior copy of male rock musicians, the author argues that Jett's various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity. The article explores how Jett's interest in punk enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre. It is further contended that as more spaces opened for women in the early 1990s, Jett's performances took a more aggressive stance on traditionally feminist issues and enabled her to use her sexuality as an offensive weapon.     

‘Womanish epistles?’ Martha McTier,female epistolarity and late eighteenth-century Irish radicalism

This article examines the epistolary practice of Martha McTier, the sister of the Ulster Presbyterian radical and founding member of the United Irishmen, William Drennan. Drawing on literary analyses of the eighteenth-century epistolary form and Jürgen Habermas's account of the development of the public sphere, it argues that through her personal correspondence McTier was able to construct herself as a political subject, engaging in the oppositional discourse of the radical public sphere. The public reputation which McTier earned as a letter-writer and the fact that her correspondence was subject to government surveillance in the build-up to the 1798 Irish rebellion challenges the designation of the female letter as an essentially private medium, concerned with the personal and domestic, and suggests a more fluid relationship between women, letter-writing and the public and private spheres     

Justice Without Transition: Truth Commissions in the Context of Repressive Rule

While the study of transitional justice, and especially truth commissions, has gained in popularity over the past two decades, the literature is overwhelmingly focused on activities in democratizing states. This introduces a selection bias that interferes with proper analysis of causes and consequences of transitional justice on a global scale. In this paper, I discuss conditions under which new repressive elites, and even old repressive elites who survive to rule and repress in nominally new systems, may choose to launch broad investigations of the past. I argue that such a decision is based on two primary considerations, the presence of internally or externally based incentives (e.g., foreign aid) and the level of political control enjoyed by old elites in the new system. I apply this argument to post-Soviet Central Asia, including a detailed case study of Uzbekistan’s 1999 truth commission based on domestic media analysis and local elite interviews.