A new model for making Aboriginal policy? Evaluating the Kelowna Accord and the promise of multilevel governance in Canada

Government policy‐making affecting Indigenous communities in Canada has often been met with stiff resistance from Indigenous leadership. We examine multilevel governance as an alternate model for Aboriginal policy‐making by examining a particular case study: the process leading up to the 2005 Kelowna Accord. We find that although multilevel governance may have the potential to produce highly desirable outcomes, its emergence seems to depend heavily on political agency. Meaningful and enduring change to Aboriginal policy‐making will therefore likely require significant institutional adjustments to the Canadian federation.     

Unipolarity,Hegemony, and the New Peace

Despite a few persistent, high-profile conflicts in the Middle East, the world is experiencing an era of unprecedented peace and stability. Many scholars have offered explanations for this “New Peace,” to borrow Steven Pinker's phrase, but few have devoted much time to the possibility that US hegemony has brought stability to the system. This paper examines the theoretical, empirical, and psychological foundations of the hegemonic-stability explanation for the decline in armed conflict. Those foundations are rather thin, as it turns out, and a review of relevant insights from political psychology suggests that unipolarity and stability are probably epiphenomenal. The New Peace can in all likelihood continue without US dominance and should persist long after unipolarity comes to an end.     

Fusing algorithms and analysts: open-source intelligence in the age of ‘Big Data’

In the age of ‘Big Data’, the potential value of open-source information for intelligence-related purposes is widely recognised. Of late, progress in this space has increasingly become associated with software that can expand our ability to gather, filter, interrelate and manipulate data through automated processes. The trend towards automation is both innovative and necessary. However, techno-centric efforts to replace human analysts with finely crafted algorithms across the board, from collection to synthesis and analysis of information, risk limiting the potential of OSINT rather than increasing its scope and impact. Effective OSINT systems must be carefully designed to facilitate complementarity, exploit the strengths, and mitigate the weaknesses of both human analysts and software solutions, obtaining the best contribution from both. Drawing on insights from the field of cognitive engineering, this article considers at a conceptual level how this might be achieved.     

The Allen priority/consequence model as a behavioral approach to reduction of high risk behavior in youth

Youth violence in America has grown to insurmountable levels. Homicide is now the third leading cause of death for youth ages 5–14, the second leading cause of death for those ages 15–24 and the number one cause of death among black males ages 15–34. With increased levels of violence and senseless killings across the nation, there is a need to explore behavioral and environmental causes of high risk behavior and various types of interventions to decrease antisocial behavior. Violence prevention should be approached comprehensively from a myriad of approaches and levels of prevention and intervention that should infiltrate individuals, homes, schools, communities and systems.

Numerous types of theories are being designed, implemented and evaluated to decrease and prevent unhealthy behaviors. While there is a need to continue to refine intervention and containment strategies, a preventative approach to addressing root causes of antisocial behaviors needs to be considered as we comprehensively look at interventions for violence prevention. The purpose of this article is to add to the body of research a theory, the Priority/ Consequence model, which depicts interrelated dynamic behavioral and societal variables that can influence, positively or negatively, attitudes, values and beliefs that establish prioritized behaviors that produce consequences.