Somewhere Between Love and Justice: a Roman Catholic Church in Paris Responds to the European Migration Crisis

The European migration crisis has had a transformative impact on many transit and destination localities in Europe, and in doing so it has mobilised many faith-based communities. This paper analyses the social action of Saint Bernard de La Chapelle, a Roman Catholic parish in northern Paris, which hosts a semi-formal association called Solidarités Saint Bernard (SSB) involved in support and relief activities for indigent migrants in the local area. Based on ethnographic research conducted within the parish and the association, I analyse how the topic of migration has become a point of exchange between the parish community and local civil society, how religious and secular discourses and motivations co-exist within SSB, and how these influences shape SSB’s social action. Through this micro-scale approach, and drawing on Luc Boltanski’s theoretical framework of regimes of action, my aim is to identify conceptual elements to better understand the broad convergence between religion, social action, and migration, and to better understand the relation between charity and justice within faith-based social action in the domain of migration advocacy more specifically.     

Environmental security and development

The development policy community has recently awakened to the importance of security as an important dimension of development policies and a basic pre-condition for their success. This paper seizes the opportunity to highlight the linkage between human security and development, and environmental security. It argues that the link is particularly strong in developing countries where human security is closely tied to peoples' access to natural resources. Drawing on a number of case studies where communities have increasingly endured hardships linked with environmental deterioration and resource scarcity, the author points to the fact that, any efforts to better the lives of peoples may be unsuccessful if they fail to conserve and enhance essential resources and life support systems.1 ?1. See, Khagram, Clark and Raad Khagram, Sanjeev, Clark, William C. and Raad, Dana Firas. 2003. From the Environment and Human Security to Sustainable Security and Development. Journal of Human Development, 4(2): 44–76.  [Google Scholar], ‘From the Environment and Human Security’. View all notes While the security literature often tones down environmental threats as soft, the author points out that they often emerge as major threats in certain contexts where, like wars, they may have detrimental and enduring impacts on peoples' security and development. This paper recommends a broader approach to security that recognises the significance of environmental threats to human security and legitimises its firm integration within the current development policy agenda. Given the crosscutting and trans-boundary nature of environmental threats, the author concludes that any development policy actions designated to mitigate environmental threats may maximise their impacts if they transcend institutional and regional boundaries, and are embedded in broader institutional collaboration.     

The Argumentative Value of ��gamic Quotations in the Spho?asiddhi by Bharata Mi?ra

In a rare book published in Trivandrum (1927), entitled Spho?asiddhi? Bharatami?rapran??t??, we find an interesting argument in defense of spho?a-theory, based on ??gamic quotations, especially RV X, 71, 4 (the stanza where the poet describes his own activity in perceiving the essence of Speech as like a beloved woman naked). The main idea is that the numerous word spho?as, as an atemporal multiplicity, free from any sensuous quality, were the objects of the ??is?? primordial intuition. So the internal diversity of the Veda is not a mere subjective convention in order to adapt the highest truth to limited human minds. The absolute brahman has an objective cosmogonical power of which the temporal mutiplicity is only the very last result. There is also an intermediate ideal multiplicity, which the Veda, as eternal and transcending the guru-?i?ya transmission, consists in.     

Student attitudes toward inmate privileges

Although corrections researchers have examined criminal justice students’ attitudes toward offender punishment and the death penalty, they have overlooked the important area of inmate privileges. Using data collected from 570 students enrolled at four different Southern universities, this study examines attitudinal differences between criminal justice and noncriminal justice majors in terms of providing inmates with psychological counseling, college education programs, television, cigarettes, weightlifting, and conjugal visits. No statistically significant attitudinal differences emerged between criminal justice and noncriminal justice majors.     

Using Spaced Learning Principles to Translate Knowledge into Behavior: Evidence from Investigative Interviews of Alleged Child Abuse Victims

The present study assessed the progress of 13 investigative interviewers (child protection workers and police officers) before, during, and after an intensive training program (n = 132 interviews). Training began with a 2-day workshop covering the principles of child development and child-friendly interviewing. Interviewers then submitted interviews on a bi-weekly basis to which they received written and verbal feedback over an 8-month period. A refresher session took place two months into training. Interestingly, improvements were observed only after the refresher session. Interviews conducted post-refresher training contained proportionally more open-ended questions, more child details in response to open-ended questions, and proportionally fewer closed questions than interviews conducted prior to training and in the first half of the training program. The need for ‘spaced learning’ may underlie why so many training programs have had little effect on practice.     

The international dimension of minority separatism: An attempt at unravelling a Pandora box

A very important problem of today's world is the separatism of minorities and its international dimension, which has not been adequately studied within IR. This is an attempt to come to grips with the international relations of separatism and, in particular, with the normative framework of separatism and the international activity of separatist movements in their quest for self‐determination. The empirical basis were seven post‐war cases of armed separatism.     

Managing the costs of modern corrections: Implications of nineteenth-century privatized prison-labor programs

The increasing use of incarceration during the 1980s has resulted in substantial enlargement of the American prison population. In addition, the costs of providing correctional services to this enlarged population has grown dramatically. One solution proposed to address the issue of escalating correctional costs is privatization. Through an examination of the early nineteenth-century New York experience with private-sector prison industrial programs, this article considers the value of privatization as a remedy to unacceptable correctional costs. Nineteenth-century problems are identified, and the implications of these problems for current privatization initiatives, both related and unrelated to prison industries, are discussed.     

"We Came to Tell the Truth": Reflections On The Tokyo Women's Tribunal

This article analyzes the development agenda Western donors have been operating on over the past decade, particularly the agenda's focus on good governance. After analyzing the academic background of this agenda, which is most evident in so-called new institutional economics, the article discusses the change in the discourse on development assistance toward selectivity, and its implementation in the policies of the International Development Association, the United States, and the Netherlands. The analysis of the policies of these three donors, and of recent empirical studies demonstrates that the donors are biased in favor of rewarding certain policies—in particular, pro-market and trade-oriented policies—on the part of aid-receiving countries. The donors have, thus, introduced clearly ideological and political elements about the socioeconomic order into a seemingly technocratic discussion about the prerequisites of governance. Because of the emphasis on market orientation and trade openness as central criteria for the judging of “good governance,” the current development assistance agenda is located explicitly in the domain of the post-Washington consensus, which links the promotion of pro-market policies to the implementation of an agenda of political reform. The article concludes by pointing out several ambiguities in the current focus on good governance. In particular, the author argues that donors tend to emphasize the instrumental value of governance and overlook the underlying structural causes of bad governance in developing countries.