American police and subcultural support for the use of excessive force

This article examines police officers' perceptions and tolerance of abuse of force. Data were collected from 3,230 sworn personnel in thirty American departments. Officers rated the seriousness of an excessive force violation, their support for discipline, and their willingness to report such misconduct. Novice officers, highly experienced veterans, and supervisory personnel were more likely than officers with moderate levels of experience to view excessive force as serious and worthy of more severe discipline. Officers in these groups also indicated greater willingness to report such incidents.     

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally

The literature of negotiation and conflict resolution continues to build on and move away from traditional emphases on transactions and decision making. Topics such as the impact of culture on negotiation once aroused debate but are no longer even controversial. Enough scholars in our large and multidisciplinary field have benefited from the insights of complementary social sciences so that few serious scholars or practitioners doubt that identity and culture are dynamic factors affecting negotiations. Some have moved beyond the quest for distributional efficiency that characterized so much early research and now advocate nothing less than social transformation and empowerment through conflict resolution methodologies. Several recent contributions to the negotiation literature—Negotiating Globally, and Reaching for Higher Ground in Conflict Resolution—are evidence that literature in the field is pushing new frontiers.Anthony Wanis-St. John: His courses include Cross-Cultural Negotiation and the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process. He was a PON doctoral fellow 1999-2001. He is a practicing mediator and facilitator.     

Economies of scope and scale in green advocacy

Environmental advocacy is a large and growing activity. Whilst a number of economists have analysed the advocacy process, no systematic attempt has been made to understand the factors influencing the organisation of the sector. We explore the relationship between economies of scale and scope in advocacy. Under the most popular specification of a Tullock-type contest, economies of scope arise when (and only when) the scale of that activity is sufficiently large. The incentives for merger are socially efficient, implying no need for policy intervention.     

Community structural predictors of spatially aggregated motor vehicle theft rates: Do they replicate?

Community-level motor vehicle theft (MVT) is not spatially random but is influenced by the structural composition of the community. Work to date did not provide a clear picture of the structural correlates of community-level MVT rates for two reasons. Cross-sectional studies had been limited to a single point in time (one wave design). In addition, studies had not adequately controlled for MVT rates in adjoining communities (spatially autocorrelated rates). The current study addressed these limitations. Drawing on structural correlates highlighted by factorial ecology and past work on motor vehicle theft, it anticipated cross-sectional connections between status, stability, age composition, and racial heterogeneity. It sought to learn if these connections persisted at two points in time spanning a decade. Census block group data from a midwestern city were merged with geocoded vehicle theft data, and a comprehensive spatial lag variable was constructed (Land & Deane, 1992). At both points in time, communities with higher MVT rates had lower socioeconomic status, and were surrounded by other communities with higher MVT rates. Community processes driving the connection between status and vehicle theft were suggested. The strong spatial dependency of MVT rates suggests attributes, events, or longer-term trends located in a section of a city may be affecting the communities located there. Issues for prevention were addressed.     

Security and governance in an uncertain world

This special issue has its origins in series of discussions within the Governance Research Centre, University of Bristol concerning the changing nature of conflict, security and development and debates about different conceptual lenses for explaining and understanding these changes. Our interest is in the relevance and the extent to which the multifaceted concept of governance explains security challenges in a world in which many previous certainties appear far less certain. Following a call for papers in 2003, we held a two-day workshop in December 2004 sponsored by NATO Public Diplomacy Programme and the International Policy Institute, King's College London to present and debate drafts of the papers, which were peer reviewed and revised for this special issue.     

“Then in 1915”: Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”

The anti-war song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” has become a cultural icon in Australia, and elsewhere has been recorded over 130 times in 10 different languages. The song was written in 1971 by Eric Bogle, a Scottish immigrant to Australia, who has penned more than 250 powerful compositions, which, among other things, focus on the failure of history to impress upon youth the futility of war. Appropriately, Bogle was named Australian Humanist of the Year in 2001 for capturing “the ethos of humanism through his perceptive and individualistic songwriting with its exposure of racism, bigotry, warmongering and injustice of all kinds”. Additionally, he was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal (1986), and was made Member of the Order of Australia (1987). This article asks why a song written by a Scot in Australia, fifty-six years after the Dardanelles campaign, feels as if it has “always existed. That it belongs to culture and country”. It questions what the appeal imbued within the lyrics of those five short verses might be and recounts the story behind the creation of what Pete Seeger referred to as “one of the world’s greatest songs”. Through interviews with the writer, and an examination of the relevant historiography, this article presents a study of “the most potent ballad of the age”. It also examines what Bogle meant when he said that it was a song that “came into its time”.     

The role of the united nations in East Timor's path to independence

East Timor has been the subject of a substantial peace keeping and peace building operation. Will the role of the UN be judged a success? Despite the evident flaws in the operation, there is little doubt that the UN played an essential role in restoring peace and stability to East Timor. Even its most controversial episode, the 1999 ballot and surrounding violence, in hindsight, can be seen as a success given the constraints of the international environment at the time. The statements of leading Indonesian officials during 1999 betrayed an incorrect reading of the East Timor problem, and generally perpetuated the myth of a civil conflict between two politically opposed sides — the reality was that the violence was the near exclusive domain of the pro‐integrationist militia groups. East Timor has now undergone a massive reconstruction of infrastructure and aspects of governance, it has had constituent elections, and full independence is expected by mid‐2002.     

Performance pledges–power to the consumer or a quagmire in public service legitimation?

One of the latest initiatives in Hong Kong's public sector reform is the launch of “performance pledges” in 1992, which have essentially been modelled on citizen's charters in the United Kingdom. While the stated aims of performance pledges, citizen's charters, or similar initiatives, are to raise the standard of public services and to make such services answer better to the needs of ordinary people, hence “empowering” the public service consumers, this latest consumerist trend in public management has more far-reaching implications, both in terms of the organization as well as the legitimation of public service provision. This article examines such implications, with specific reference to the Hong Kong situation, and argues that the outcome of the development seems to point to the empowerment of public managers rather than the consumers as the official rhetoric would imply.