Beyond the Blank Cheque: Arming Iran during the Ford Administration

When President Gerald Ford decided to maintain and deepen arms relations with Iran, he cemented a momentum that became near impossible for a successor to break by continuing the policy of his predecessor Richard Nixon. Nixon had given the Shah of Iran a “blank cheque” to purchase whatever American arms he desired—short of nuclear weapons. Although Ford’s authority would be challenged by members of his own Administration and a Congress seeking to claw back some of its authority, the need to support allies in the Middle East against the threat of the Soviet Union, even during a time of détente, remained paramount.     

Masculinity and Spousal Violence: Discursive Accounts of Husbands Who Abuse Their Wives in Ghana

This study investigated the influence of cultural notions of masculinity and its enactments on husband-to-wife abuse in Ghana from a discursive psychological perspective. Two focus group discussions and four in-depth personal interviews were conducted with 16 perpetrators (husbands) from rural and urban Ghana. Participants’ discursive accounts revealed that social anxieties of husbands, their fear of being perceived by others as weak or emasculated, and their disappointment with unfulfilled notions of masculine sovereignty influence conjugal violence. Perpetrators constructed a wife’s expression of dissent to her husband’s wishes and commands as an encroachment on masculine spaces, a gender-norm violation, or as providing a public challenge to male identity and thus violence could be used as an obligatory passage to manhood. Perpetrators also mobilized shifting and ambivalent discourses that draw upon culturally familiar notions of maleness to both resist and authorize a patriarchal privilege in marriage.