Loyalist supergrass trials: an opportunity for open source intelligence?

In the 1980s some thirty members of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland both republican and loyalist, agreed to provide evidence against their former colleagues in return for a reduced sentence or immunity from prosecution, a new identity and life. Such individuals became commonly known as ‘supergrasses’. This article drawing on archival and documentary research explores the potential opportunity these supergrass trials provided for republican paramilitary groups to gather open source intelligence on their loyalist counterparts. It also tracks whether individuals named by loyalist supergrasses were subsequently targeted by opposing paramilitary groups on their acquittal or release from prison.     

Postrecession Drivers of Preferences for Homeownership

The analysis presented in this article finds little evidence to suggest that individuals' preferences for owning versus renting a home have been affected by their exposure to recent house price declines and loan delinquency rates, or by knowing others in their neighborhood who have defaulted on their mortgages. Instead, this analysis finds individual characteristics, particularly current housing tenure, to be the strongest predictors of postrecession demand for homeownership.     

‘Votes for women’: An analysis of the militant campaign

When one reads the literature on the militant suffragettes, one is left with the impression that the extent of their militancy was confined to smashing a few windows, slashing some works of art and, at most, setting fire to empty houses. This picture does not, however, stand up to closer examination. This article seeks to show how the militant campaign for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom embodies the characteristics of terrorism. The militant campaign involved the use or threat of use of violence, the targets selected were symbolic and the methods employed were extreme. Although the aim was to instil fear or to terrorise, one form of militancy not entertained by the suffragettes was the indiscriminate killing and injuring which has become a familiar tactic in violent protest. Even with this consideration the militant campaign can be viewed as one involving terrorism.     

Nato Enlargement and the Spread of Democracy: Evidence and Expectations

The second enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since the end of the cold war fueled an ongoing debate over whether the alliance contributes to democratization in Europe. In the 1990s, critics warned that the 1999 NATO enlargement would cultivate a new cold war and prove irrelevant to democratic consolidation in central Europe. Events have not borne out these forecasts, however. In Poland, not only did NATO build a civilian consensus in favor of democratic control over the armed forces corresponding to NATO norms, but it also delegitimized Polish arguments for defense self-sufficiency that had derived their credibility from Poland's experience of military vulnerability and foreign domination. Such democratizing and denationalizing trends have contributed to stability in postcommunist Europe. An assessment of the seven states that joined in 2004 similarly reveals some scope for NATO's influence in all cases. The alliance's access to domestic reform processes, however, will be uneven across cases in ways largely consistent with the predictions of the theoretical framework in this article.

     

Digital India? an email experiment with Indian legislators

ABSTRACT

Of the many tasks elected representatives perform, constituency service is among the most difficult to observe and, therefore, to measure. However, a burgeoning literature uses digital tools such as email to experimentally evaluate the responsiveness of political elites to requests for constituency service. To date, this literature has overwhelmingly focused on the developed world. In this article, we describe the results of an email experiment in which we sent plausible, but fictitious constituency service requests to national legislators in India to evaluate their responsiveness, helpfulness, and possibly discriminatory behavior. While the overall response rate to our request is quite poor, those that do respond tend to offer “meaningful” responses. We find scant evidence of legislators discriminating on religious lines.     

Paradoxes of Urban Housing Informality in the Developing World

This article addresses a series of paradoxes regarding informal settlements in cities in the developing world and their relation with the legal system. The first paradox regards the penalization of illegal land occupations on the one hand versus the legalization of that same practice on the other. Second, it looks at the relationship between land occupations as systematic violations of property rights, but with the goal of forming new property rights and thus paradoxically supporting private property as a substantive principle. Third, the reasoning behind the fact that the same system that denies legal access to housing for poor sectors simultaneously attempts to incorporate informal settlements in an ad hoc manner through legalization schemes is examined. It is shown that there is a logic to these paradoxes, which, although contradictory from standard legal perspectives, can be accommodated within a theoretical framework that distinguishes an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, from the state legal system, operative outside it. The proposed framework not only settles the paradoxes, but, this article concludes, can also guide attempts to deal with the enormous anticipated growth of informality in the developing world.     

Teaching restorative justice: developing a restorative andragogy for face-to-face,online and hybrid course modalities

Teaching restorative justice in an academic setting is different from teaching almost any other academic course. Courses taught in the context of academic criminal justice programs tend to reinforce the structural inequalities in society, replicated and reinforced by instructor driven classroom experiences. In contrast, effective teaching of restorative justice should emulate the values of principles of restorative justice in the organization and management of the course. Teachers of restorative justice must ‘walk the talk’ and apply restorative principles and values to the design and delivery of the course itself. A conceptual framework for ‘restorative andragogy’ is developed that blends principles and values of adult learning with those of restorative justice. Four principles of this approach are identified and applied across three instructional modalities – face-to-face, online only, and hybrid courses. This approach provides a theoretically grounded model for effective teaching of restorative justice courses.     

Safety in small numbers: Local strategies for survival and growth in Romania and the Kyrgyz Republic

Using a comparative study of farm households from poor rural communities in Kyrgyzstan and north-east Romania this paper explores the intricacies of a variety of forms of cooperation in agriculture. The findings highlight the safety net, labour specialisation, asset-pooling and service delivery functions of different groups that enable rural livelihoods to, at times, cope and at times improve in situations of imperfect information, sluggish labour and land markets, and constrained capital markets. The research presented here indicates that small to medium forms of cooperation provide the rural poor with predictable livelihood strategies under conditions of uncertainty. Specifically, cooperative action, in the form of groups, substitutes for imperfect markets. Despite the push for decollectivisation and privatisation across transition countries there remains a place for encouraging group initiatives, at least for the medium term, on the grounds of both poverty alleviation and agricultural growth.     

The Road from Dayton to Brussels? The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Politics of War Crimes in Bosnia

Abstract

The tenth anniversary of the massacre of 7–8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995 set in stark relief the continuing salience of war crimes in the political life of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the country now firmly on a path ‘from Dayton to Brussels’, dealing with the war crimes legacy is critical to its future development. Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is a non-negotiable condition for further progress toward membership of the European Union and NATO's Partnership for Peace, while in the long-term, dealing with the legacy of war crimes is crucial to establishing lasting peace in Bosnia and in the region. This article examines the potential contribution of the ICTY to the restoration of peace in Bosnia in the context of debates about the role of post-conflict justice in societies in transition from war to peace and in the context of the international community's use of the war crimes issues as a political bargaining tool. It will be argued that the two are inextricably linked as short-term pragmatic advantages brought by cooperation work in tandem with longer-term goals of peace and reconciliation.