The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The ‘Feminine’Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a ‘space of innocence’ in the Sertão could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a ‘feminine’ responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.     

A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT TESTING INMATE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS*

Research Summary: In California, incarceration in the state prison system is in part organized by security level. The higher the security level, the more restrictive the setting. Upon arrival at a reception center, new inmates are scored within a classification system that is used to determine the appropriate level of security. In this paper, we report on the development and testing of a new inmate classification scoring system. Over 20,000 inmates took part in a randomized experiment in which half were assigned to their housing using the existing scoring system and half were assigned to their housing using the new scoring system. There were two key outcomes: (1) potential mismatches between the number of inmates assigned to different security levels and the available beds and (2) reports of inmate misconduct. Policy Implications: We conclude there to be some potential crowding problems, but that the new scoring system is much better than the old scoring system in sorting inmates by the likelihood of misconduct. We also conclude that some predictors popular in the past are no longer effective (e.g., marital status), while some new predictors are extremely powerful (e.g., gang activity), and that one can build in a number of mandatory housing placements (e.g., for sex offenders) and not degrade the overall effectiveness of the new classification system. Finally, the new classification system is shown to be more user‐friendly than the existing classification system and well received by the staff responsible for implementing it.     

‘TO BE,BUT NOT TO BE SEEN’: EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVANTS

International civil servants (ICS) are largely excluded from the analysis of International Organizations (IOs) because states are assumed to be the determining force in shaping their behaviour. Even principal‐agent and constructivist analyses often treat an IO’s staff as a unit and are concerned primarily with states’ capacities to control IOs. Examining the opportunities of ICS, rather than the choices of states, provides a better means of understanding the capacities of ICS to contribute to the operation of IOs, and especially when they participate in multilateral negotiations. We suggest that structure, competence, legitimacy and culture provide a framework for analysing ICS variable capacity. We use the Secretariat of the WTO, known as a ‘member‐driven organization’, to illustrate how ICS can play a critical role in achieving the IO’s objectives. A word on our title. It comes from Esse, non videri in the original, as quoted by a director at the WTO in an interview in April 2003.     

Inequality,Ethnicity, Political Mobilisation and Political Violence in Latin America: The Cases of Bolivia,Guatemala and Peru*

The paper explores the relationship between political violence and ‘horizontal’ inequality in ethnically‐divided countries in Latin America. The cases studied are Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru. Preliminary results are reported on the measurement of horizontal inequality, or that between groups, defined in cultural, ethnic and/or religious terms. The Latin American cases are shown to be often more unequal than the cases from Africa and Asia included in the wider study of which the work forms a part. The complex relationship between such inequality, ethnicity and political violence is explored historically. Ethnicity is today rarely a mobilising factor in violence in the Latin American cases, but the degree of inequality based on ethnicity is shown to be highly relevant to the degree of violence which results once conflict is instigated. History explains why.