Peace-building in Haiti: the case for vertical integration

In light of growing attention to grassroots and community-based approaches to peace-building, this paper explores this ‘local turn’ through an examination of ongoing efforts to address community-based insecurity in the urban slums of Port-au-Prince. In recent years, these communities have been the site of an ongoing series of experiments, involving a range of different actors, aimed at reclaiming them from armed gangs. However, the fragmented nature of these interventions and the range of different strategies deployed, from enforcement to inducement to engagement, have limited their overall impact. Drawing on a distinction between horizontally- and vertically-integrated peace-building, as well as on recent insights about the centrality of state-society relations in peace-building processes, we make a case for greater coherence and co-ordination between bottom-up community violence reduction efforts and top-down police reform. In the particular case of Haiti, we suggest that renewed interest in community policing may provide one platform through which a more vertically-integrated form of peace-building, one which connects community-level agency with wider, structural-level reform processes, might emerge.     

Rethinking Chile’s ‘Chicago Boys’: neoliberal technocrats or revolutionary vanguard?

The term ‘Chicago Boys’ remains closely associated with the orthodox neoliberal adjustment implemented in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship. The conventional portrayal of the Chicago Boys is of a group of US-trained, technocratic economists who institutionalised neoliberal principles and technocratic prerogatives in public policymaking in Chile. This article will contend the Chicago Boys were much more than neoliberal technocrats: they were a revolutionary vanguard that designed and led a capitalist revolution and radically altered the material and ideological foundations of the nation.     

Comparing Agenda Content and Roll-call Behaviour in Regular and Lame-duck Sessions of the House of Representatives, 1879–2010

This paper investigates how agenda content and floor behaviour in the US House of Representatives vary across regular and lame-duck sessions. The presence of departing members created a legislative environment marked by increased ideological and participatory shirking, resulting in higher levels of uncertainty. That uncertainty affected how members devised proposal strategies in the face of more fluid voting patterns in lame-duck sessions. The analysis of a unique data set comprised of roll-call votes on House floor motions with an identifiable sponsor from 1879 to 2010 (the 46th to 111th Congresses) uncovers significant changes in the relative frequencies of particular categories of votes, in the success rates on votes within those categories, as well as in the spatial characteristics of floor motions. These findings underscore how the move to the lame-duck session ushered in a distinct and different legislative environment.