Looking at terrorism through left realist lenses

While terrorism has moved into the spotlight of criminological study, including critical criminology, it has yet to be thoroughly explored from a left realist perspective. Left realism addresses four aspects of crime: causes of offending, impact on the victims, and both official and public responses to crime. A left realist approach to terrorism would argue that similar to those who engage in street crimes, many terrorists are socially or economically disenfranchised young men who become involved in terrorism through connections with similarly situated members of the fringe population, and “get tough” policies on terrorism will backfire. Four propositions of left realist theory organized by DeKeseredy and colleagues are presented and addressed through the extant literature, which offers partial support for a left realist explanation of terrorism.     

Pretexts and US foreign policy: the war on terrorism in historical perspective

This article analyzes the way that US foreign policy élites have used pretexts to manage public opinion. Policymakers, it is argued, often seize upon threatening external events, and use these events to create a favorable political climate in which to “sell” policies of militarization and external expansion to the public. The article argues that the Bush administration has used the threat of terrorism as a pretext to implement a wide range of policies that had been decided upon in advance of the 9/11 attacks. It also argues that the recent uses of pretexts by the Bush administration have strong historical precedents: extended case studies of pretexts are presented for the events surrounding the Korea crisis of 1950 and the Afghanistan crisis of 1979–1980, as well as the more recent War on Terrorism.     

Psychosocial factors associated with depression in urban adolescent females: Implications for assessment

The major goals of this research were (1) to determine the incidence of depression in a nonclinical sample of urban adolescent females and (2) to identify demographic, sociocultural, and behavioral factors related to depression in this group. A racially and socioeconomically heterogeneous sample of 116 adolescent girls was recruited from public high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Measures used were the Beck Depression Inventory, the Mooney Problem Check-List, and a brief demographic questionnaire. Depression was found to be significantly related to parental occupation, geographical mobility, and number of self-reported problems. Implications for assessment are discussed.This research was supported by a Biomedical Research Support Grant awarded to the author as the principal investigator through the University of California at Berkeley, 1981–1982. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association, San Francisco, California, April 1983.Dr. Gibbs holds an M.S.W. and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. Her major research interests are in the areas of adolescent psychopathology and psychiatric help-seeking patterns of minority and low-income clients.