Human rights practices and the Indonesian middle class

Abstract

During the New Order we have often witnessed or read in the newspapers or at least heard from various circles about KOPKAMTIB actions such as banning or ordering coverage of a story in the mass media through only a telephone call; carrying out arrests, detention, and interrogation against citizens without regard to the proper procedures delineated in law; inhumane treatment during questioning; carrying out executions performed without regard to legal procedures, more commonly known as “mysterious shootings”; undertaking “political screening” of citizens to determine their loyalty to the government as in the case of prospective nominees in the General Elections; depriving citizens of their civil rights without trial, such as forbidding signatories to the Petition of 50 to leave the country and depriving them of the ability to earn a living by instructing all agencies and state banks not to honor their requests; the arrest and detention of religious teachers and so forth. All of this has been done with the excuse that the individuals involved are suspected of engaging in extremist or other subversive acts.     

Epistemic Communities and the Diffusion of Ideas: Central Bank Reform in the United Kingdom

In May 1997 the incoming Labour government gave the Bank of England operational independence in the setting of interest rates. This reform is puzzling as it was introduced by a party whose roots lie with the trade union movement, and resisted by the Conservatives whose political support comes largely from business, the financial sector and homeowners who stand to benefit most from price stability. Economic ideas are central to explaining the outcome. The Labour Chancellor was convinced by an epistemic community of monetary experts that central bank independence would achieve New Labour's electoral goals. These political incentives were absent for the Conservatives, who preferred to set interest rates strategically to increase their popularity with voters.     

“They're all just little bits,aren't they”: South Australian lesbian mothers' experiences of marginalisation in primary schools

Abstract

Multiple formations of family have always been a part of Australia's social and historical landscape, yet social norms typically function to marginalise some family forms while according others a privileged status. Marginalisation on the basis of sexuality, for example, whilst arguably somewhat less prevalent than in previous decades, nonetheless continues for those families positioned outside the heteronorm. Institutions such as schools can play an important role in transforming marginalising practices, yet research such as that presented in this article suggests that schools often also perpetuate marginalisation, even if unintentionally. Drawing on interviews conducted with twenty-three lesbian mothers, this article highlights the often subtle ways in which such mothers with children in South Australian primary schools experience marginalisation by educators. Specifically, we argue that marginalisation occurs in the form of injunctions made upon lesbian mothers to inform educators about their families (and to do so in often highly normative ways), to accept that it is their role to manage discrimination, and to treat as routine the marginalisation of their families. Such findings indicate that changes still remain necessary within Australian educational practices in order to ensure the full inclusion of lesbian mother families on terms of their own making.     

Public administration in hong kong: Crises and prospects

Current studies on Hong Kong public administration have overlooked three emerging crises of the administrative system -- the crises of mediocrity, the public service, and the metapolicy -- which may result in a complete collapse of the colonial regime. The analysis reveals the following. Firstly, operating within a paradoxical context, civil servants find it difficult to maximize their contribution. Hard pressed by the delimma of “to strive for excellence or to observe medicoirty,” many choose the latter. Thus, the overall performance of many Hong Kong public agencies and civil servants is unacceptable. Secondly, at the absence of a political theory which redefines the relationship between the political system and socio-economic system and thus the mission of the public service, many civil servants lack commitment to the public service and therefore the norm of medicority is reinforced. And thirdly, the government has reformulated its metapolicy in a way that system overloading is likely, thus making Citizen insubordination probable. It is conclusded that the future of Hong Kong is bleak and that remedial actions are awaiting: the first task is the quest for a new set of political ideology and public philosohgy; the next is reformulation of a new metapolicy, followed by forceful pulbic sector management reform.     

Transformational Government? The role of information technology in delivering citizen-centric local public services

Following on from five years of ‘electronic government’, the Labour Government has recently announced a new five year plan for ‘transformational government’. Like its predecessor, t-government emphasises the important role of information technology in enabling the delivery of modernised public services. Modernisation is defined as an increasing emphasis on citizen choice, personalisation of services and understanding and responding to service user needs. This paper explores the appropriateness of the t-government agenda by drawing upon lessons learned from the preceding e-government era. Arguably the most significant citizen-focused technology of the e-government era was customer relationship management. The potential of CRM to support service transformation is explored and co-production, an alternative approach to citizen-centric service design, is examined both as a way of addressing weaknesses in IT-enabled service transformation and as a candidate later stage in the evolution of citizen-centric local public services.     

An assessment of sexual health risk behaviors among female youth in juvenile detention

This study investigated the association between risky sexual behavior and drug use among female youth sentenced to a regional juvenile detention center. Preincarceration behavioral health risk data were collected from a modified version of the Youth Risk Behaviors Surveillance Survey completed by respondents. Almost all of the 105 participants had been detained before their current sentence, more than half of them were sexually active before the age of 13, and 70% had smoked marijuana or drank alcohol by age 14. A regression analysis was conducted to determine if preincarceration sexual health risk behaviors were significant enough to predict continued risk behaviors related to pregnancy, disease prevention, and substance use. Findings indicate that youth detention-based prevention programs should emphasize sexual and drug-risk reduction strategies as a means to reduce risky behaviors for this population.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

Scientific capacity building and the ontologies of herbal medicine in Ghana

Abstract

The Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine, a large herbal medicine research center in Ghana, has received important research equipment and training through a transnational research collaboration involving the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. By situating this project in regional debates about traditional medicine research priorities and the ontologies of plant medicine, this article argues that the collaboration had the perceived effect of standardizing research practices oriented toward drug discovery rather than the rationalization of crude drug preparations. This shows that “capacity-building” components of research collaborations should not be taken as the transfer of neutral goods from one location to another. They are charged with the political potential to make crucial decisions about the objects of research in postcolonial Africa.