Utility of a Grief Services Program for Medical Examiners' Offices

Medical examiner/coroner's (ME/C) offices investigate sudden, violent, and unexpected deaths, leaving those close to the deceased suffering traumatic loss with little in terms of support and counseling. We investigated a grief services program (GSP) at the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) to better understand the needs of bereaved individuals, identify the services provided, and propose our findings as a model for others. A total of 1085 contacts occurred over 1 year, with the majority occurring at OMI (60.5%), followed by telephone (23.1%). Support was primarily provided to those suffering a loss due to homicide (28.8%) and suicide (26.1%). The roles grief counselors play in the setting of a GSP and ME/C office are multiple. Given the frequent utilization of OMI's GSP and diverse reasons for visits, it is apparent there is a need for GSPs at ME/C offices, particularly given the traumatic nature of deaths investigated by ME/Cs.     

Of public interest: How courts handle rape victims' privacy suits

In spite of a string of unfavorable court decisions, rape victims continue to bring privacy suits against news organizations that identify the victims. Based on case history, journalists have little to fear from such privacy suits because appellate courts usually find victims' names add credibility to stories and, therefore, are of public interest. Most judges seem to believe that they cannot logically rule a basic fact, such as a name, to be private in one set of circumstances and not in others. A ruling in rape victims' favor may create a slippery slope that erodes the press' First Amendment freedoms. However, the courts' limited opinions provide victims with the possibility that in some circumstance a court may rule against the press on this issue. From a journalist's perspective, a broader ruling is needed to discourage rape victims from bringing suits that, while destined to be unsuccessful, are nonetheless costly to defend.     

The Geography of Warscape

This article elaborates a heuristic approach to understanding the geography of warscape from a theoretically informed perspective. It argues that agency in protracted civil war emerges at the ambiguous interface of different, competing systems of power and authority. In order to account for the multiple trajectories of threat and opportunity that warscapes offer to different social actors and at different times and places, the article proposes the concept of ‘governable order’, which is derived from a critical review of the literature on ‘social navigation’ and ‘governable space(s)’. The usefulness of combining these three concepts is illustrated by two empirical vignettes. They demonstrate the dynamics of governable spaces in distinct phases of the Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka civil wars. The two cases highlight the temporal and territorial fluidity of governable spaces, which both constrain and enable warscape inhabitants' agency.     

The local in the global: rethinking social movements in the new millennium

In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize locally based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil, ‘livability movements’ in third-world cities, and living wage movements in the USA. Movements such as these come to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participate in them come together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum. To date, it is the transnational character of these protests that have excited the most attention. Building on scholarship that looks at the link between participatory democracy and social movements, this article takes a different tack. We show how some social movements have shifted their repertoire of practices from large mass events aimed at making demands on the national state to local-level capacity building. It is the local struggles, especially the ways in which they have created and used institutions in civil society through extending and deepening democracy, that may be the most significant aspect of recent social movements, both for our theories and for our societies. Yet these aspects have received less attention, we believe, because they are less well understood by dominant social movement theories, which tend to focus on high-profile protest events. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing.     

Campaign appeals in Nigeria's 2007 gubernatorial elections

Ethnicity has emerged as a prominent issue in electoral contests around the world, particularly in countries that have embraced multiparty elections in the past few decades. What factors influence ethnic mobilization and the politicization of ethnicity? Although a number of factors have been hypothesized to influence the politicization of ethnicity in the comparative politics literature, many of these relationships have not been established through empirical testing. This study empirically tests a number of the hypotheses derived from the literature with our unique data set on candidates' ethnic appeals in the Nigerian 2007 gubernatorial elections. We find that political parties' use of ethnic appeals is correlated with the competitiveness of the election, nature of the campaign, partisan attachments, and social, demographic, and economic characteristics of the states. Of particular note is the finding that the salience of ethnic identity in the electorate influences political leaders' use of ethnic appeals.     

The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees

This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by candidate selection procedures and electoral rules show some relationship to committee assignments, but with a good deal of variation across national cases and individual careers.