What doctors and policymakers should know: Battered women's views about mandatory medical reporting laws

Medical professionals in forty-five states and the District of Colombia are under a legal obligation to report a variety of injuries to the police, including those believed to be the result of domestic violence. Responses to these laws by doctors and battered women have been mixed. Using logistic regression analysis, this study explored battered women's views about mandatory medical reporting laws controlling for and examining a variety of demographic, situational, and legal factors. Three of the four dependent attitudinal measures (perceptions of general support for mandatory reporting as well as perceived benefits of the law for themselves and others) demonstrated little variation across all factors. The fourth measure - willingness to seek medical care in communities with a mandatory law - however, produced a number of significant relationships among the demographic, situational and legal factors. The results and policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

Muslim sound,public space,and citizenship agendas in an American City

Based on fieldwork in a small Michigan city, this study examines a contestation over the right for Muslims to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer, or adhan, into the streets. At stake in such contestations over public space is a struggle over conflicting citizenship agendas, or ideological formations seeking to advance particular models for good citizenship and the acceptable integration of minorities. Some Hamtramck citizens who identified themselves as interfaith actors advocated a citizenship agenda to support the call to prayer based on a material and spatial conception of shared civic culture that challenged assumptions about political differences between religious communities. To forward these aims, interfaith actors organized public ritual events that offered opportunities for visceral and experiential investments into the sights, sounds, and ceremonies of Hamtramck's religiously diverse public arena. This strategy encouraged people to a cross boundaries into previously exclusive religious spaces and presented opportunities to expand the cultural boundaries of municipal belonging.     

The Rise and Fall of a Crimean Party Boss: Nikolai Vasil’evich Solov’ev and the Leningrad Affair

Abstract

This essay focuses on the career of N. V. Solov’ev, a prominent Stalin-era official and little-known victim of the 1949 Leningrad Affair. When treated as a case study, Solov’ev’s life and times illustrate a variety of important things about Stalinism as a whole. Most obviously, Solov’ev’s rapid ascent into the party nomenklatura during the interwar years exemplifies the dramatic trajectory that many in party service enjoyed during this period. Once in office, Solov’ev promptly embraced the Stalinist political culture that had promoted him there, at times even emulating the general secretary himself. Finally, Solov’ev’s postwar disgrace and ruin reveal much about the broader functioning of this political system, particularly in regard to Joseph Stalin’s concerns about the USSR’s emergent party elite.     

Civil society and democratization: The role of service-providing organizations amid closing civic spaces

This article argues that current democracy promotion strategies relying on rights-claiming advocacy NGOs are falling short of their democratization goals, as authoritarian regimes are closing the space through restrictions on the NGOs that attempt to carry them out. In response, we suggest a reexamination of earlier approaches to involving civil society in democratization efforts by shifting the focus back on service-providing civil society organizations that have largely become side-lined in democracy-building agendas. Specifically, service providers tend to be more capable of functioning “under the radar” thus contributing to democracy in both direct and indirect ways, and thus escaping closing space restrictions. The key concerns about their independence from the state, as well as under what conditions the state may be less successful in coopting the independent service-providers, however, remain unresolved and warrant future research.     

Bilateral Graduation: The Impact of EPAs on LDC Trade Space

Abstract

As trade is prominently mainstreamed into development policies, the ongoing Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations between the EU and the African, Carribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries are a turning point in Least Developed Countries (LDC) engagement with the international trading system. The process covers most UN-designated LDCs and is the first time they feature in the first row of international trade talks. We explore how the space LDCs occupy in the trade regime will be affected by EPAs. The analysis suggests that they move LDCs towards effective graduation from special and differential treatment, while innovating on policy tools to address underdevelopment.