Utility of a Grief Services Program for Medical Examiners' Offices

Medical examiner/coroner's (ME/C) offices investigate sudden, violent, and unexpected deaths, leaving those close to the deceased suffering traumatic loss with little in terms of support and counseling. We investigated a grief services program (GSP) at the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) to better understand the needs of bereaved individuals, identify the services provided, and propose our findings as a model for others. A total of 1085 contacts occurred over 1 year, with the majority occurring at OMI (60.5%), followed by telephone (23.1%). Support was primarily provided to those suffering a loss due to homicide (28.8%) and suicide (26.1%). The roles grief counselors play in the setting of a GSP and ME/C office are multiple. Given the frequent utilization of OMI's GSP and diverse reasons for visits, it is apparent there is a need for GSPs at ME/C offices, particularly given the traumatic nature of deaths investigated by ME/Cs.     

Remembering remotely: would video-mediation impair witnesses' memory reports?

Witnesses often experience lengthy delays prior to being interviewed, during which their memories inevitably decay. Video-communication technology – favored by intergovernmental organizations for playing larger roles in judicial processes – might circumvent some of the resourcing problems that can exacerbate such delays. However, whereas video-mediation might facilitate expeditious interviewing, it might also harm rapport-building, make witnesses uncomfortable, and thereby undermine the quality and detail of their reports. Participants viewed a crime film and were interviewed either one day later via video-link, one day later face-to-face, or 1–2 weeks later face-to-face. Video-mediation neither influenced the detail or the accuracy of participants' reports, nor their ratings of the quality of the interviews. However, participants who underwent video-mediated interviews after a short delay gave more accurate, detailed reports than participants who waited longer to be interviewed face-to-face. This study provides initial empirical evidence that video-mediated communication (VMC) could facilitate the expeditious conduct of high-quality investigative interviews.     

The Internet,the Perpetual Beta,and the State: The Long View of the New Medium

Though fecund as a medium across which subversive ideas can be propagated, the Internet is also hazardous to these ideas. By virtue of the perpetual beta and the increasing under-dominance of Internet content, which effectively means there is no last edit on the Internet, all ideas, including militant ones, are subject to the scrutiny of Internet users. The hazard of the perpetual beta and the new plasticity of information is atomizing the violent militant memes associated with Al Qaeda.     

The Four P-Words of Militant Islamist Radicalization and Recruitment: Persecution,Precedent, Piety,and Perseverance

This article suggests that a single interpretative framework can be used to understand Islamist militant rhetoric, and to compare it to supposedly more orthodox campaigns such as Irish Republican militancy, differences of culture, scale, and lethality. Both refer to histories of persecution; cite exemplars of their just cause drawn from historical precedent; maintain utopian ideals and justifications of violence that drawn from culturally relevant versions of piety; and use examples of perseverance against overwhelming odds drawn from their respective histories. This framework of “4Ps”— persecution, precedent, piety, and perseverance—is apparent even on the Internet, where rhetoric is necessarily atomized.     

Target Hardening and Terrorist Signaling: The Case of Aviation Security

In this article, we examine the relationship between hardening a target and the value that a terrorist group derives from attacking it. We use a simple expected value framework to compare how the expected value of attacking a hardened target varies between a violence-based approach, where terrorists are presumed to be maximizing the physical damage done to the target, and a signaling-based approach, where terrorists are presumed to be maximizing the symbolic value of their attack. We argue that, if it is proper to understand terrorist attacks as costly signals of terrorist strength or determination, hardening a target actually increases the expected value of attacking a target (relative to its value before hardening), even if the attack fails. We go on to examine the evolution of aviation security, and trace how al-Qaeda's views of airplanes and airports as targets have changed since 9/11. As aviation targets were hardened with increasingly onerous security measures, al-Qaeda began to see even attacks that did not result in detonation as successes, in large part because of what they signaled about al-Qaeda's abilities, and the ability of al-Qaeda to impose costs on the U.S. and other countries even in the absence of explosions.     

Lashkar-i-Taiba: Roots,Logistics, Partnerships,and the Fallacy of Subservient Proxies

Please click here to view a statement of retraction concerning this article.     

A Review of: “Thomas Hegghammer. Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism Since 1979.”

Charles King, Ending Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 308. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 94, notes. ISBN 0–19–829343–7, £14.99. ISSN 0567–932X.

Michael Howard, George J Andreopoulos and Mark R Shulman (eds.), The Laws of War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. vii + 303, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0–300–05899–3 (hb), £22.50; ISBN 0–300–07062–4 (pbk) £11.95.

Martha Crenshaw and John Pimlott (eds.), Encyclopedia of World Terrorism. Armonk: Sharpe Reference, 1997, 3 vols. Pp 768. illustrations, bibliography; general, names and geographical indexes. ISBN 56324–806–9 (hbk) £275.     

Non-Alignment and Beyond: India’s Interest in Latin America, 1961–1972

ABSTRACT

Between 1961 and 1972, Latin America came to capture India’s diplomatic imagination. Officials within India’s Ministry of External Affairs identified strengthened ties with the region as a way to augment, restrain, and transcend the Non-Aligned Movement, further India’s international prestige and political influence, spread Indian culture, and bolster India’s economy. India’s interest in Latin America climaxed after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi prioritised the region and Pakistan strengthened diplomatic relations with Panama in autmn 1967. Yet uncertainty over the internal realities of Latin America hindered any Indian pivot. In the end, India’s aspirations for Latin America failed to materialise.