Contested Engagements: Youth and the Politics of Citizenship

In this paper, a framework is presented for exploring how youth perform their citizenship through political engagements. The framework provides a way to explore the agency of youthful citizens as imagined by different agents and the ways that youth understand their performances as citizenship. Using interviews with university students and administrators at six universities in Manchester and Glasgow, a distinction is highlighted between agency and the performance of political acts in the production of citizenship, and the implications of this distinction for the development of autonomous citizens.     

National development and the globalisation discourse: Confronting 'imperative' and 'convergence' notions

The Bonn Agreement of December 2001 lays the foundations for a political transition in Afghanistan after 23 years of war. The agreement excludes the defeated party, the Taliban, while seeking to commit the remaining groups to a long-term and loosely defined peace process. With Afghan regionally based political-military groups defined largely along ethnic lines, and closely linked to external powers, rebuilding national authority will be a slow and conflictual process. Rebuilding the coercive capacity of the state is essential to overcome strong centrifugal tendencies, yet must be timed so as not to get ahead of the restoration of legitimate political authority. International assistance can support the political recovery by being conscious of the need to neutralise the 'spoilers' of the peace process. Making haste slowly in aiding economic recovery can prevent armed competition for power at the centre. To promote this kind of transition, and promote Afghan influence in the peace-building process, the international aid community must fundamentally reorient the strategies and methods of past involvement in the country.     

A Ferris Wheel Accident at a Movable Amusement Park

This study presented a Ferris wheel accident case. A Ferris wheel is composed of many parts, and the outmost ring of it is assembled using a lock pin. This accident occurred because the lock pin caught the door of a gondola and the gondola overturned. Five of the seven passengers in the gondola fell to the ground, along with the gondola's viewing window. The investigation revealed that the gondola became stuck when its door was caught by a lock pin at the Ferris wheel's three o'clock position. The contact between the door and the lock pin was due to a structural problem: There was not enough space allotted between the door and the lock pin. Therefore, if a passenger pushed on the gondola's door, the potential existed for contact between the door and the lock pin.     

Mandating treatment for drug possessors: The impact of Senate Bill 123 on the criminal justice system in Kansas

Kansas' Senate Bill 123 (SB 123) created mandatory community-based drug treatment for individuals convicted of first- or second-offense drug possession. This study examined the impact of SB 123 on sentencing practices, supervision, and treatment services across Kansas. The study indicated that SB 123 diverted drug possessors not from prison, as intended, but from one form of community supervision to another, subjecting more offenders to greater surveillance and longer sentences. Such “front-end” net-widening was due to the structure of the law itself and a lack of understanding of pre-implementation sentencing practices. In some counties, judges engaged in some circumvention of the law, suggesting possible local-level differences in buy-in among courtroom actors; such circumvention was also focused on offenders with more serious criminal histories, indicating judicial-level evaluations of offender amenability to treatment. While SB 123 offenders received the treatment they were assessed to need, the provision of treatment remained heavily concentrated in a few providers, increasing disparities in access to treatment and making the success of the program highly dependant on a small number of institutional actors.     

Self-Interest,Automaticity, and the Psychology of Conflict of Interest

This paper argues that self-interest and concern for others influence behavior through different cognitive systems. Self-interest is automatic, viscerally compelling, and often unconscious. Understanding one's ethical and professional obligations to others, in contrast, often involves a more thoughtful process. The automatic nature of self-interest gives it a primal power to influence judgment and make it difficult for people to understand its influence on their judgment, let alone eradicate its influence. This dual-process view offers new insights into how conflict of interest operate and it suggests some new avenues for addressing them or limiting some of their greatest dangers.