Giving Voice to ‘Age at the Edge’ – A Challenge for Social Workers Intervening with Elder Abuse and Neglect

The purpose of this qualitative study was to learn about social workers’ experience of the therapeutic encounter with victims and perpetrators of elder abuse and neglect and its implications for their personal and professional lives. Participants were 17 experienced women social workers, who worked with abused and neglected older adults in Israel. Data were collected by in-depth semi-structured interviews, which were later transcribed and content analyzed. Four main themes were revealed: (1) The Complexity of the Experience of the Therapeutic Encounter; (2) Circles Echoing Between the Professional and the Personal; (3) Between Growth and Attrition; and (4) Experiencing the Mission and its Meaning. As time is running out for older adults, the “now or never” perspective shapes social workers’ encounter with elder abuse opening a unique kind of dialogue. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.     

En Route to Revolution: The Communists and the Free Officers—Honeymoon and Separation

Organized communism had already emerged in Egypt shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Afterwards, it was characterized by internal splits and rivalries, which were followed by constant persecutions by the authorities. Nevertheless, revolutionary platforms presented by communists gradually seeped into government policy and thinking, noticeably after the July 1952 revolution. This study sheds new light on the causes for the formation of the complex relations between Egypt’s military regime and the communist movement. The intimate working relations and clandestine cooperation between the Free Officers and the largest communist organization, the Democratic Movement for National Liberation, proved to be constructive and, more importantly, successful, following the military takeover of 23 July. However, the Officers–Communists honeymoon was ephemeral and the ad-hoc alliance disintegrated shortly thereafter. Based on untapped exclusive first-hand sources drawn from a variety of archives, including Egyptian and Russian, this article provides a new narrative to the origins of one of the most studied subjects in the modern history of the Middle East—the Egyptian July 1952 revolution.     

Defending <Emphasis Type="Italic">Why</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">Law</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Italic">Matters:</Emphasis> Responses to Commentaries

Why Law Matters examines various legal and political institutions and procedures and argues that the desirability of these institutions and procedures is not contingent and does not hinge (only) on the prospects that these institutions are conducive to the realization of valuable ends. Instead, various legal institutions and legal procedures that are often perceived as contingent means to facilitate the realization of valuable ends matter as such.     

Armies of God,Armies of Men: A Global Comparison of Secular and Religious Terror Organizations

This article compares the violent activity of secular and religious terror organizations. Utilizing data compiled by the Global Terrorism Database cross-referenced with secondary and primary sources regarding the degree of religious components embedded in organizations’ ideologies, it tests the violent patterns of activity carried out by organizations guided by predominantly secular, secular/religious, and religious ideologies, between the years 1970 and 2012. The findings confirm that a) religious ideology correlates with specific, more deadly, attack tactics and violent patterns; and b) the degree of religious components within terror organizational ideology should be tested along a spectrum: the more religious an organization is, the more attacks it tends to carry out, and the deadlier its attacks become.     

Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change

This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.     

Cultural Trauma as a Potential Symbolic Boundary

Using the case of the Holocaust as a cultural trauma in the Jewish-Israeli context, some insights are suggested as to the ways younger members of collectives view cultural trauma as a symbolic boundary. The findings obtained from three groups of students, each expressing their views on a different facet of the Holocaust as a symbolic boundary, suggest that the major contributing factor that turns cultural trauma into a symbolic boundary is the way in which members of the collective categorize the modes through which others, within and outside the collective, relate to that cultural trauma.

General courts,specialized courts,and the complementarity effect

Among the major decisions any legal system must make is deciding whether to establish general courts with broad jurisdiction, or specialized courts with limited jurisdiction. Under one influential argument—advanced by both judges and legal theorists—general courts foster coherence within the legal system. This Article identifies a distinct effect of establishing general courts: the “complementarity effect.” In the case of complementarity, general courts strategically apply different principles in different fields, such that litigants losing in one sphere (e.g., public law) are compensated in another (e.g., private law). We support this conjecture by analyzing three case studies.     

Perceptions of Time and Their Impact on Negotiations in the Arabic-Speaking Islamic World

This article examines how perceptions of time affect Arabic-speaking Islamic negotiators and how their attitudes about time, and their corresponding behaviors, may differ from those of their Western counterparts. We begin by identifying cultural differences in the conceptualization of time and then comment on the role of time in negotiations, discussing how time influences bargaining, trust, and negotiation tactics. In the section on tactics, we discuss stall-and-delay tactics, the use of the past as an objective standard, and limits on negotiating the future. Our purpose is to encourage negotiators from the West to be knowledgeable about the way they, as well as negotiators from Arabic-speaking Islamic cultures, conceive of and use time in negotiations. We believe that understanding that the very concept of time is often quite different in these two cultures is an important step in facilitating negotiations that cross these cultural boundaries.