NATO: The United States, Transformation and the War in Afghanistan

During the Bush years, NATO exhibited in stark form two trends which have long characterised its development: periodic exposure to crisis and division, and a subordination to American leadership. Despite signs of American indifference towards the alliance, talk of the Bush administration levering a break with NATO was always overstated, particularly so during its second term of office. Views of NATO after 2004 were shaped by Afghanistan giving rise, in fact, to a return to the alliance on America's part. NATO remains important to Bush's successor but on terms which are as demanding as those of his predecessors. NATO, in other words, is valued in so far as it accords with current US foreign policy priorities. The safest assumption in this regard is that Obama will continue to favour the trend towards a global NATO pursued by the Bush administration. However, retreat (or defeat) in Afghanistan could hasten a contrary trend towards a consolidating NATO with a renewed concentration on the wider Europe.     

Claiming Kapwa: Filipino Immigrants,Community-Based Organizations,and Community Citizenship in San Francisco

Filipino immigrants and Filipino-serving community-based organizations (CBOs) in San Francisco work to meet community members’ immediate needs. At the same time, it activates political participation for Filipinos to make claims on traditional citizenship from the city agencies under an albeit xenophobic climate. Although city-level legislation marks San Francisco as politically progressive, Filipino community members experience the national anti-immigrant climate in the United States through a lack of services for integration. We argue that immigrants and CBOs develop “community citizenship” that link Filipino immigrants to local state services while engaging in community building activities that affirm the transnational identities of Filipinos as part of their (in)ability to participate politically in San Francisco. Through qualitative interviews from Filipino organizers and CBO staff, we argue that CBOs use Filipino core cultural values to facilitate collective responsibility for community members’ needs that is not only local but also always transnational under contradicting currents of liberal progressivism and neoliberal conservatism in the city and nationally.     

Divergent Paths to Martyrdom and Significance Among Suicide Attackers

This research used open source information to investigate the motivational backgrounds of 219 suicide attackers from various regions of the world. We inquired as to whether the attackers exhibited evidence for significance quest as a motive for their actions, and whether the eradication of significance loss and/or the aspiration for significance gain systematically differed according to attackers’ demographics. It was found that the specific nature of the significance quest motive varied in accordance with attackers’ gender, age, and education. Whereas Arab-Palestinians, males, younger attackers, and more educated attackers seem to have been motivated primarily by the possibility of significance gain, women, older attackers, those with little education, and those hailing from other regions seem to have been motivated primarily by the eradication of significance loss. Analyses also suggested that the stronger an attacker’s significance quest motive, the greater the effectiveness of their attack, as measured by the number of casualties. Methodological limitations of the present study were discussed, and the possible directions for further research were indicated.     

Earth Day and Its Precursors: Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Midtwentieth‐Century U.S. Environmental Policy

Earth Day 1970's legacy overshadows two earlier events resulting in popular misconceptions about U.S. environmental politics: that environmental policy began with Earth Day and that Congress and the president were not concerned with the environment until public opinion and interest groups pressured them. These misconceptions increase public opinion ambivalence and frustrate environmental leaders. This paper describes Earth Day 1970, the congressionally established Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission established in 1958, and President Kennedy's Natural Resources Tour of September 1963, arguing the latter two prepared for the convergence of multiple streams of policy change that resulted in the first Earth Day.     

HIV/AIDS legal issues in the United States

The HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to be a leading public health issue in the United States. During the past decade, the epidemic has shifted away from the gay community, although gay and bisexual men continue to be the largest single HIV exposure category. Now, HIV increasingly affects low-income people of colour in urban areas, as well as women. As AIDS becomes more and more a minority, inner-city disease, public focus on the epidemic as a significant social and political issue is waning. While a full survey of current issues in US law is beyond the scope of this article, the focus here is on current issues that are highly relevant to the direction the epidemic appears to be taking.     

Intercepting Disgrace: Lacuna and “Letter to John Coetzee”

ABSTRACT

This review article examines two palimpsest rewritings of J. M.Coetzee’s canonical but controversial novel, Disgrace (1999). Both rewritings are by women: Lacuna, a novel published in 2019, is by a white South African woman, Fiona Snyckers, and “Letter to John Coetzee” takes the form of a short story by Michelle Cahill, a woman of color living in Australia, published in Cahill’s collection Letter to Pessoa (2016). The article uses Cahill’s coinage of “interceptionality” to discuss how dominant narratives may be disrupted and subverted, particularly when it comes to representing gender-based violence in the arts. It concludes with a discussion of South African artist Gabrielle Goliath’s exhibition, “This song is for … ” (2019).