Endogenous development in Somalia: bridging the gap between traditional and Western implementation methodologies

This practical note examines the implementation approach of African Development Solutions (Adeso) in Somalia, a country which is recovering from over two decades of conflict. It discusses how their endogenously derived targeting method, known as ICBT, is implemented and the way it challenges social norms for positive outcomes. Cash-based response is analysed as a recovery method as well as a way to engage community participation, particularly with marginalised groups. Implementation challenges are highlighted to explore the relationship between traditional and globalised (Western) values.     

The Palestinian intifada: An analysis of a popular uprising after seven months∗

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that the Internet is a reliable source of operational knowledge for terrorists, allowing them to train for terrorist attacks without access to real-world training camps and practical experience. The article distinguishes between abstract technical knowledge (what the Greeks called techne) and practical, experiential knowledge (mētis), investigating how each helps terrorists prepare for attacks. This distinction offers insight into how terrorists acquire the practical know-how they need to perform their activities as opposed to abstract know-what contained in bomb-making manuals. It also underscores the Internet's limitations as a source of operational knowledge for terrorists. While the Internet allows militants to share substantial techne, along with religious and ideological information, it is not particularly useful for disseminating the experiential and situational knowledge terrorists use to engage in acts of political violence. One likely reason why Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists have not made better use of the Internet's training potential to date is that its value as a source of operational knowledge of terrorism is limited.     

Post-authoritarian Indonesia

Abstract

The article assesses the post-authoritarian situation in Indonesia in the light of experiences of Thailand and the Philippines, two societies in which the unraveling of authoritarianism has been followed by the rise of formal electoral politics. The authors suggest that the demise of authoritarian regimes in all three cases, born of the cold war, has more fundamentally seen the reconfiguration of politics in which dispersed, predatory, and frequently antidemocratic forces have appropriated the institutions and discourses of democracy. They also suggest that the Indonesian case has been less conducive to the emergence of effective pro-democracy, civil society-based movements in the wake of authoritarianism. This, they explain, is largely the consequence of the 1965 anticommunist massacres in Indonesia, which has no equivalence in the other two countries, and the resultant highly centralized authoritarianism that was more successful in disorganizing social and political opposition for three decades.     

More than Ideology: Conservative–Liberal Identity and Receptivity to Political Cues

To many commentators and social scientists, Americans’ stances on political issues are to an important extent driven by an underlying conservative–liberal ideological dimension. Self-identification as conservative vs. liberal is regarded as a marker of this dimension. However, past research has not thoroughly distinguished between ideological identity (a self-categorization) and ideology (an integrated value system). This research evaluates the thesis that conservative–liberal identity functions as a readiness to adopt beliefs and attitudes about newly politicized issues that one is told are consistent with the socially prescribed meaning of conservatism–liberalism. In Study 1, conservative–liberal identity, measured in 2000, had an independent prospective effect on support for invading Iraq in 2002 and support for the Iraq war in 2004, controlling for substantive ideology, party identity, and demographics. In Study 2, conservative- and liberal-identifiers adopted stances on farm subsidy policy based on randomly varied cues indicating which ideological group supports which stance. This cue-based influence was mediated by adoption of attitude-supportive beliefs. Discussion addresses the joint impact of political discourse and identity-based social influence on the organization of political attitudes.     

Redefining Apartheid in International Criminal Law

This article asks: to what extent is Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute—the crime of apartheid—a tenable crime in international criminal law? It will be argued that despite the obligations incumbent on states not to intentionally discriminate against social groups, there is no customary legal norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity. This is premised on the distinction between state obligations as different from norms demanding individual liability in international criminal law, as well as inadequacies of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) and the absence of case law relying on apartheid as a crime against humanity. Further, the weaknesses hindering the formation of a customary norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity will be assessed with regard to the Rome Statute. Also it will be shown that the lack of coherence of Article 7(1)(j) demonstrates that the crime of apartheid is subsumed by the crime of persecution. Finally, two suggestions are offered on how the crime of apartheid could be established as a distinct offence in international criminal law. The central thesis of this paper is that the crime of apartheid is ambiguous and inoperable. In order for Article 7(1)(j) to be relevant in international criminal law, the offence must be reworked and clearly articulated.     

The next generation of court-mandated domestic violence treatment: a comparison study of batterer intervention and restorative justice programs

Objectives

The most common approach to treatment of domestic violence crimes in the United States is the mandated group-based Batterer Intervention Program (BIP). Several alternative treatment approaches have been developed over the years, including a restorative justice-based treatment program for domestic violence offenders called Circles of Peace (CP). This study compared a CP program administered in Arizona with a local BIP program, in controlled settings.

Methods

This study involved a randomized controlled trial with 152 domestic violence cases randomly assigned to either BIP or CP between September 2005 and March 2007. Independent sample t tests were used to measure treatment outcomes post-random assignment, in terms of both domestic violence and non-domestic violence re-arrest rates during four follow-up periods (6, 12, 18, and 24 months).

Results

CP participants experienced less recidivism than BIP during all follow-up comparisons. However, statistically significant differences were detected only for the 6-month (p?<?.1) and the 12-month (p?<?.05) follow-up comparisons for non-domestic violence re-arrests, and no statistically significant differences were detected for the domestic violence re-arrests.

Conclusions

The findings are generally statistically non-significant at .05. While these results do not suggest a change in policy from BIP to CP for domestic violence crimes, it does dispel the popular belief that restorative justice cannot be used to treat domestic violence criminal activity, in that CP does no worse than the traditional batterer intervention program. Given the low statistical power and high attrition rates, more research is necessary to test CP and restorative justice treatment generally in court-mandated domestic violence cases in order to understand the treatment impact on both domestic violence and non-domestic violence offenders.