Governmental financial resilience under austerity in Austria,England and Italy: How do local governments cope with financial shocks?

The recent economic and fiscal crisis provides an opportunity for learning lessons of general and practical relevance about how governments face shocks affecting their financial conditions. This article draws on the resilience concept to investigate the organizational capacities that are deployed and/or built by local governments (LGs) to respond to such shocks, looking at their combinations and interactions with environmental conditions. The article presents the results of a multiple‐case analysis of 12 European LGs across Austria, Italy and England. The analysis allows us to highlight and operationalize different patterns of financial resilience, that is, self‐regulation, constrained or reactive adaptation, contented or powerless fatalism, that are the result of the interaction and development over time of different internal and external dimensions.     

A Disruptive Influence? “Prevent‐ing” Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice

This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter‐Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi‐structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analysis documents how and why a logic of disruption has assumed increasing prominence in counter terrorism work. In respect of police interventions in particular, implementing disruptions, rather than pursuing fully‐fledged prosecutions, represents a pragmatic way of reconciling increasing demand with limited resources, as well as managing some of the difficulties of translating intelligence into legal evidence. Conceptualized in this way, the analysis positions disruption as a distinctive mode of crime prevention; one premised upon logics of near‐event interdiction. As such, it is understood as rather different in its operations and functions to other forms of “early intervention” that are increasingly prominent in much contemporary crime prevention policy. By focusing upon how specific Prevent interventions are implemented and performed this analysis makes a particular contribution to our knowledge of counter terrorism work. This reflects the fact that most previous studies of Prevent and other countering violent extremism programs have provided analyses of community perceptions and reactions to policing and the policy frame, rather than the configuration of the interventions themselves.     

Only a Matter of Time? The Role of Criminal Competence in Avoiding Arrest

While prior research has shown that the probability of detection plays a role in the decision-making of many offenders, much less is known on offenders’ relative success in avoiding arrest. In this study, we draw from detailed criminal career data on 172 offenders involved in lucrative criminal activities to examine the role of criminal competence in the probability of being arrested in a given month. We examine a particular aspect of competence, criminal efficiency, which is defined as the ability to earn a relatively large amount of money for each crime committed. Our research design allows us to disentangle the effect of criminal efficiency as a static trait of offenders from the dynamic variations in efficiency that offenders experience over time. Results show that efficiency is a strong, negative predictor of arrest, both at the static and dynamic levels.     

Realistic rehabilitation

Rehabilitation involves re-establishing livelihood security among the poorest households in order to reduce vulnerability to future disasters, re-start the local economy in a sustainable fashion, and avoid dependency. This article discusses experiences of post-war rehabilitation in Mozambique and suggests that, although many households rapidly re-started crop production, they remain vulnerable because they have not been able to rebuild reserves. The author cautions against over-rapid withdrawal from relief programmes, and suggests that distributing cash and allowing households to buy what they need most is sometimes more appropriate than distributing food, seeds, tools, and selected household goods.