What Hat Do I Wear Now?: An Examination of Agency Roles in Collaborative Processes

As collaborative approaches to resolving public disputes become more prevalent, agency officials are finding themselves in unfamiliar terrain. This article offers one conceptualization of agency roles in collaborative processes, drawing from the experiences of natural resource managers and enviromental regulators at the federal level. Based on an examination of 65 cases, the authorsidentify three distinct "hat" that effective agency officals wear in collaborative processes - leader, partner, and stakeholder. The objective and function of each role is assessed, along with the implications of agency facilitation. The most successful agency representatives were able to blend the three primary roles, and did not act as facilitators of the collaborative process.     

Reflections of the Evolving Concept of 'Private Policing'

Once popular state-centred political frameworks, while declining in popularity on many normative agendas, nevertheless continue to guide how we think about and examine policing. Early studies into the private policing phenomenon have thereby focused upon the formal paid private security sector, a set of agencies which do not depart too radically in appearance from traditional public police services. More recent empirical studies have yielded data inconsistent with the established conceptual frameworks. Theorists have been assembling these data into alternate ways of thinking about collective life, which may have profound implications for the ways in which to choose to govern in the future. Further research addressing developments in networked nodal governance may be suggestive of progressive alternatives.     

Skyrocketing House Prices and Stagnating Wages,What's Wrong?

With the U.S. economy still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and record unemployment, real estate prices continue to skyrocket, pricing thousands of house hunters out of the market in the U.S. and Canada. This may seem counterintuitive for an economy that is still recovering from recession, is yet to reach 2019 GDP levels and saw unemployment peak at just over 14 percent in April, 2020. The last time U.S. home prices raised this quickly, it led to an ensuing crash that brought down the global economy.     

The Arsenal of Insurrection: Explaining Rising Support for Rebels

Recent scholarship has established several key dynamics in civil wars: since the nineteenth century, rebel victories have increased in likelihood; external support is one of the most significant predictors of rebel victory; and rebel groups have become increasingly likely to receive foreign backing. What is missing is an explanation of why patterns of third-party aid to rebels changed over time. Data on foreign assistance to rebels over the last two centuries reveals the odds of groups receiving aid increased from about one in five to about four in five. The nature of the patron also altered significantly, from great powers, to lesser states, and then nonstate actors. We explain these patterns using three variables: (1) great-power competition; (2) norms of national self-determination; and (3) globalization. This paper explores this theory with a case study of aid to rebel groups in Algeria since the 1830s.     

European remedial coherence in the regulation of non-consensual disclosures of sexual images

The non-consensual dissemination of sexually explicit images or videos for no legitimate purpose represents a serious sexual violation by means of breaching an individual's ability to control their own sexual identity. This article argues that the only adequate legal response to this behaviour is targeted criminal regulation, and that action on a regional level is within the European Union's competence by virtue of Article 83(1) TFEU. The approaches of EU Member States to the phenomenon through targeted criminal law are examined in order to extract positive and negative elements of the respective regulatory systems. Drawing on the experiences of these States, as well as on existing EU criminal directives, a draft directive is included to illustrate what form a European regional system of criminal regulation may take.     

Large-scale land deals in Sierra Leone at the intersection of gender and lineage

There is wide engagement with large-scale land deals in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from the perspectives of development and international political economy. Recently, scholars have increasingly pointed to a gendered lacuna in this literature. Engagement with gender tends to focus on potential differential impacts for men and women, and it also flags the need for more detailed empirical research of specific land deals. This paper draws from ethnographic data collected in Northern Sierra Leone to support the claim that the impacts of land deals are highly gendered, but it also argues that lineage in a land-owning family and patronage intersect with these gendered impacts. This data supports my claim that analysis of land deals should start from an understanding of the context-dependent, complex arrays of power and marginality. Such a starting point allows for a wider and ‘messier’ range of impacts and experiences to emerge.