Mass Killing and the Politics of Legitimacy: Empire and the Ideology of Selective Extermination

How do the perpetrators of mass killing legitimise their behaviour? This article examines the legitimation of some of the worst cases of mass killing in the past two centuries. It finds that the colonial experience helped establish a moral framework that facilitated arguments designed to place whole groups beyond normal legal and moral protection on account of some assigned traits. This moral framework was evident in different colonial settings and rested on claims negating the right of the victim group to protection and claims valourising their violent extermination. It also underpinned the moral justifications offered by perpetrators of some of the twentieth century's worst episodes of mass killing. This article examines the “family resemblances” between the arguments used by perpetrators in different settings, indentifies their common structure, and examines the factors that influenced their capacity to secure legitimacy for mass killing.     

Self-Esteem and Delinquency Revisited (Again): A Test of Kaplan's Self-Derogation Theory of Delinquency Using Latent Growth Curve Modeling

Investigations of Kaplan's self-derogation theory of delinquency are numerous, but results have been mixed. Progress in this domain of research may be hampered by the use of statistical methods that do not optimally test hypotheses derived from the theory. In this study, the relationship between self-esteem and delinquency is examined using latent growth curve modeling (LGM). Analyses of panel data from the Youth In Transition study supported Kaplan's theory by showing that delinquency was positively associated with growth in self-esteem among adolescent boys who initially reported having low self-regard. It was also found that self-esteem had a moderate, but significant, negative relationship with subsequent delinquency, net of prior delinquent behavior. It is concluded that future investigations of the relationship between self-esteem and delinquency would benefit from the use of LGM.     

Suing Canadian governments: Core public policy and operational decisions

Challenges in distinguishing between core policy and operational decisions in the public policy process have spawned a legal grey area in Canadian public administration. Governments are immune from civil liability for policy decisions made by the cabinet yet they remain exposed to liability for operational decisions by public servants. We seek to raise awareness of this nexus within the Canadian public administration community by drawing on key interviews with lawyers, former attorneys general, a former premier, a former judge and a legal scholar. We explain that demarcating policy from operational decisions relies on written documentation that is difficult to locate and may not exist. Clarity is desired, but Canadian courts are reluctant to overrule a public authority’s opinion, which is based on socio-economic and political considerations. We conclude with observations for public administrators.     

The transformation of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Between 2000 and 2005, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, until recently, the Food Stamp Program) caseload increased by half. As the Great Recession unfolded, the SNAP caseload grew even more rapidly. Further, over the past two decades the composition of the caseload has shifted sharply away from families combining food and cash assistance and toward families receiving food assistance in the absence of any other major, means‐tested income support. By analyzing components of the caseload separately, we provide new and more insightful estimates of the effects of food and cash assistance policies and the economy on both the change in the composition of the caseload and the large caseload swings over the 1990s and 2000s. We find that the economy can explain a portion of caseload changes, but not compositional shifts. Food and cash assistance policies help to explain both changes. In total, the combination of SNAP and welfare policy changes account for about half of the sharp increase since 1994 in the share of SNAP households receiving food, but not cash, assistance. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Dousing the flames of resource wars

The international community has had patchy success in using levers such as sanctions to end African conflicts over resources, make errant governments more accountable and ensure greater transparency in revenue management. The article highlights some of the successes and failures of the international system in this regard.     

The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and the Iraq War

The moral and political reverberations of the Iraq War of 2003 are still being felt all over the world. In the belligerent democracies of the West, official inquiries of all kinds and conditions have probed and exposed the nature of government, the reflexes of the national security state, and, most extraordinarily, the sensitive relations between rulers and intelligencers. For all parties the consequences have been severe. Focusing on Britain, and especially on the inquiries led by Lord Hutton and Lord Butler - an odd couple but a revelatory combination - this article takes stock of the reckoning.