Girls as “Weapons of Terror” in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leonean Rebel Fighting Forces

Girls—both willingly and unwillingly—participate in terrorist acts within the context of contemporary wars. These acts range from targeting civilians for torture and killing to destroying community infrastructures so that people's physical and psychological health and survival are affected. Girls witness or participate in acts such as mutilation, human sacrifice, forced cannibalism, drug use, and physical and psychological deprivation. This article focuses upon girls in two fighting forces: the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone and their roles as combatants whose primary strategy is perpetrating terrorist acts against civilians. In analyses of gender and terrorism, girls are typically subsumed under the larger category of female, which marginalizes their experiences and fails to recognize that they possess agency and power.     

Pluralising global governance: Analytical approaches and dimensions

This paper argues that a significant reframing of global poverty is likely to emerge in the next decade as world poverty becomes less about the transfer of aid and more about domestic distribution and thus domestic politics. This proposition is based on a discussion of the shift of much of global poverty towards middle-income countries. There are questions arising related to how countries are classified and to administrative capacities, as well as to domestic political economy, but it is argued that many of the world’s extreme poor already live in countries where the total cost of ending extreme and even moderate poverty is not prohibitively high as a percentage of gdp. By 2020, even on fairly conservative estimates, most of world poverty may be in countries that do have the domestic financial resources to end at least extreme poverty; this could imply a reframing of global poverty.     

How Economists Help Central Government Think: Survey Evidence from the UK Government Economic Service

Economic thinking is widely used now across most areas of government activity, though there is not much research on what professional economists do. This paper, therefore, develops and reports on a survey of over 500 members of the UK Government Economic Service, which we use to shed light on the activities and thinking of practitioners. We find, inter alia, that professional economics can be seen as drawing on at least four distinct economic paradigms, that the uses of economics vary significantly between areas of government and that whilst significant use of research can be made, this is not necessarily a defining aspect of professional practice.     

Managing Middle Earth: The Evolving Role of Local Authority Chief Executive Officers in Auckland,New Zealand

New Zealand is often seen as a ‘test-bed’ for public sector management reform. Indeed, much has been written about the machinery and operation of central government, yet little attention has been paid to the actors and institutions of local government. This article, using evidence obtained through a series of semi-structured interviews with serving and former Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in the Auckland region, examines the impact upon local authority chief executives of two major reforms within local government. Firstly, the impact of sweeping managerial reforms in 1989, and then secondly reforms to reinvigorate and reinvent the scope and scale of local authorities in the period since 2002. The article argues that whilst local government CEOs in New Zealand are managerially strong, these skills need to be refocused to ensure maximum benefit for local government can be gained from post-2002 reforms.     

Convergence in British Cultural Policy: The Social,the Cultural,and the Economic

It is increasingly the case that cultural policy at all levels of governance is expected to address a suite of concerns much broader than those traditionally associated with the arts and creative practice. Indeed, in many nations, including most notably Britain, the concerns of cultural policy now embrace the economic and the social, as well as the cultural. In Britain, this convergence is occurring as part of a broader policy concern to ameliorate social exclusion by providing people with opportunities to participate in the creative economy. Drawing on the findings of a major study of the factors shaping cultural policy internationally, this article identifies and maps the priorities, key intersections, and convergences associated with these priorities in British cultural policy. The article argues that, in spite of taking different forms and having varying emphases depending on the constituency and the level of governance involved, the convergence agenda currently dominating British cultural policy is nevertheless remarkably consistent in terms of the discourses surrounding culture, the remit of the cultural sphere, and strategic policy implementation.     

Green citizenship and the political critique of injustice

Over recent decades, normative theories of green citizenship have drawn upon observations that a long-prevalent dualistic understanding of society, as completely subjecting nature, is being displaced by growing political and cultural support for a holistic view of society, as participating in nature. Differences between avowedly liberal and civic-republican interpretations of green citizenship notwithstanding, the normative theories share five key social critiques: (1) the need to challenge nature/culture dualism; (2) to dissolve the division between the public and private spheres; (3) to undermine state-territorialism; (4) to eschew social contractualism and (5) to ground justice in awareness of the finiteness and maldistribution of ecological space (ES). This article offers a sympathetic provocation to normative theories of green citizenship. Adopting a critical realist perspective, it describes the partial and problematic realisation of these critiques in the contemporary types of social and political participation, contents of the rights and duties and institutional arrangements of the ‘stakeholder’ citizenship that has become established within the neoliberal or weak eco-modernising, global competition state. This perspective is important because it offers new insights into the discursive framework that encompasses contemporary debates over justice and injustice. In particular, injustice from within the post-industrial ecostate appears to be a diffuse whole-of-society problem, the by-product of unsustainable development that lacks an identifiable class of perpetrators. This makes the progressive task of enunciating claims that injustice is present in some senses difficult, while conservative ideological positions are simplified.     

Pathways to impact in local government: the mini-Stern review as evidence in policy making in the Leeds City Region

Although in recent years great emphasis has been placed on global agreements and national commitments on climate change, ultimately action on mitigation and adaptation must take place at the local level. Many local authorities have to face questions of whether they should develop policies on climate change, and if so, on what evidence should policies be designed and delivered. This paper describes how academic research on the economics of low carbon cities (the ‘mini-Stern review’) helped create such an evidence base for the Leeds City Region and its constituent local authorities. We describe how the response to the evidence and the pathways to impact were different in the individual local authorities and what this means for our understanding of evidence in local policy making. In terms of Weiss’ (Social sciences and modern states: national experiences and theoretical crossroads. Advances in political science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991) classification, the study was mainly useful as an argument and idea rather than being used instrumentally. We find that the policy and political context in each authority determines to a large extent whether such an academic study is useable as evidence. The contents and timing of the study need to align with existing policy and/or political agendas: is climate change on the agenda at all, with what priority and how is it framed. We find confirmation of a relationship between the policy problem type and the role of evidence as argument, idea or data. The mini-Stern study itself was just one contribution to wide-ranging processes of informing, convincing, pressurising, etc., not just within the different councils but also within the wider communities. Other contextual factors include composition, agenda and activities of local civil society and the local business community. Finally, it depends on the expertise of policy officers in the councils what use is made of evidence. Making policy takes (much) time, translation and negotiation across levels and sectors. Policy work describes how policy officers bring their diverse forms of knowledge to bear on policy questions; how this work is done is something that is learned from practice rather than from the study.     

Sudden infant death due to neurofibromatosis type I

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the unexpected death of an infant under the age of 1 year, where a complete autopsy, including scene investigation, fails to reveal a cause of death. Although the frequency of SIDS has decreased almost 50% over the past 10 years, it remains the leading cause of death in infants aged 1 to 6 months. SIDS is a diagnosis of exclusion and requires the elimination of a wide range of possible causes, including asphyxia, poisoning, abuse, occult heart disease, and other natural disease processes. In this report, we describe the case of an infant death initially suspected to be a SIDS death in which autopsy revealed an optic pathway glioma (optic glioma or hypothalamic glioma) and other stigmata of neurofibromatosis type I.     

The ethics of immigration controls: Issues for development NGOs

It can be argued that immigration restrictions constitute a form of ‘global apartheid?s, ensuring that poorer sections of world society are prevented, by legal and physical force, from sharing in the world's sum of riches. This article seeks to develop this theme, by arguing that immigration controls are based on dubious ethical and practical foundations, and that development NGOs should be willing, in their educational and advocacy work, to challenge their validity.     

Industry effects of medical device regulation: the case of diagnostic imaging equipment.

In 1976 Congress passed legislation authorizing the regulation of all medical devices. Some observers predicted that this regulation would have adverse effects on the newly regulated industries. This paper examines the major features of the medical device regulatory program and investigates how the regulation has affected the diagnostic imaging equipment industry. The results indicate that medical device regulation has not materially affected competition or innovation within established product classes in this industry. This suggests that, by choosing methods of regulation that differentiate among levels of potential risk to consumers, the goal of consumer protection can be achieved with fewer undesirable effects on the regulated industry.