Southeast Asia after 11 september

Southeast Asia has become the ‘second front’ in the global campaign against terrorism. Former concerns on the part of the United States about the human rights failings of regional regimes have been shelved in order to secure cooperation against supporters of Al-Qaeda, and United States troops have been directly committed to the field in the Philippines. Although there is confirmed evidence of international terrorist activity undertaken by small cells in Southeast Asia, this issue has also served to entrench illiberal regimes and trends. While the US may destroy terrorist groups its strategy may also further undermine democracy in the region, thus contributing to the political and social conditions that are conducive to the emergence of terrorism.     

Mother teresa meets Genghis Khan: The dialectics of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating career choices

We replicated and extended earlier work showing the connection between social dominance orientation and the perceived attractiveness of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating careers using data from two large and independent samples of UCLA students. Consistent with expectations, the data from both studies showed that the greater the students' level of social dominance orientation, the more attractive hierarchy-enhancing careers such as criminal prosecutor, police officer, and FBI agent were perceived to be. Similarly, the greater the students' social dominance orientation, the less attractive they found hierarchy-attenuating careers such as public defender, civil rights lawyer, and human rights advocate. These conclusions held even after controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status and political conservatism. Canonical correlation analysis disclosed that the attractiveness of these career paths within the general domain of law made only one, bipolar and unidimensional projection within social dominance space. The nature of this bipolar dimension reproduced the hypothesized distinction between hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating social roles. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.     

The Pacific between opportunity and risk

Economic Policies in the Pacific Area Developing Countries, by Bela Balassa. Macmillan, Houndmills and London, 1991. vi + 216 pp. £40. ISBN 0–333–540492.

Pacific Destiny. Inside Asia Today, by Robert Elegant. Headline, London, 1991. ix + 661 pp. £5.99 paperback. ISBN 0–7472–3677–1.

The Dawn of the Pacific Century. Implications for the Three Worlds of Development, by William McCord. Transaction, New Brunswick NJ and London, 1991. ix + 222 pp. ISBN 0–88738–367‐X.

Pacific Asia in the 1990s, by Masahide Shibusawa, Zakaria Haji Ahmad, and Brian Bridges. Routledge/Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1992. viii + 167 pp. £35. ISBN 0–415–02173–1.     

Analysis of the stages of change model of drug and alcohol treatment readiness among prisoners

A classification and regression tree (CART) analysis was applied to data for 237 male participants (M = 31.93 years, SD = 7.64) in a prison-based substance abuse treatment program to study the integrity of the Stages of Change model of treatment readiness. Using the Stages of Change Questionnaire (STOCQ), participants were assigned to Contemplation (102), Action (118), or Maintenance (17) groups. A CART analysis then examined differences in the overall group profiles on the basis of scores on the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking, the Situational Confidence Questionnaire, and the Carlson Psychological Survey. The assumption of discrete stages of change was not supported. Alternative models are suggested: one based on states of change and one on personality characteristics. A focus on equal attention to both cognitive and behavioral aspects of substance abuse treatment readiness is suggested.     

Environmental Justice as Scalar Parity: Lessons From Nuclear Waste Management

The development of major infrastructure projects, such as power stations, waste facilities or transport networks, commonly raises concerns of how to ensure environmental justice within policy and planning. Environmental justice has been divergently theorised, though procedural/participative, distributive and recognition-related elements are commonly cited. With growing inter-disciplinarity between normative ethics and the geographic social sciences, there is a renewed interest in the scalar aspects of environmental justice (particularly in relation to infrastructure projects)—how the framing of environmental decisions at multiple and conflicting scales results in disparities between locally affected communities, and regional and national decision-making authorities. In analysing this problem, the paper has three principal aims. The first is to outline the problem of scalar environmental justice. The second is to explore a practical case of scalar environmental justice, by examining the decision-making processes surrounding radioactive waste management in the UK. The third is to outline a new concept of “scalar parity” derived from the radioactive waste policy process, whereby local communities and regional and national political stakeholders are charged with balancing their competing interests through the “fulcrum” of a partnership organisation, to fairly resolve environmental justice disputes. This scalar parity model is used as an exemplar of good practice in environmental justice resolution that could be applied to other major infrastructure projects.     

‘This accursed child’: the early years of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741-90) actress,philosophe and feminist

The childhood and early youth of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741- 90) who later achieved some notoriety as an actress, correspondent of Denis Diderot and feminist, throws light on the lives of an artisan family in mideighteenth-century France and on the experience of one delinquent daughter. This study examines Marie Madeleine Jodin's life in relation to different categories of discrimination which she experienced; as a Protestant child, as a libertine daughter and as an actress. Her experience illustrates the workings of systems of authority employed in the eighteenth century to control young women as it impinged on an individual. It is argued that the violent familial and institutional conflicts of Jodin's early life were later reflected in her feminist treatise, Vues législatives pour les femmes (1790), which called for the establishment of a Women's jurisdiction over women. In particular her proposal to eliminate public prostitution and her attacks on the police des moeurs (morals police) have their origin in the bitter experience of her incarceration in a prison for prostitutes in her late teens. The collusion of authority (la police des moeurs) with les filles publiques came to symbolise for her the corruptions of the ancien régime     

Maternal health care challenges within African immigrant communities

Historically, immigration has had a significant impact on the changing demographic of the Canadian society. Each year more newcomers enter the country. There are more than 45 ethno-cultural associations and more than 100 different ethno-cultural groups residing in Nova Scotia. In the recent past, social science researchers are becoming increasingly involved in identifying ways of effectively addressing the social and health needs of this culturally diverse Canadian population. There is very limited literature on the Nova Scotian experiences of immigrant women especially those of African descent. For the government to develop public policy that ensures the inclusion of vulnerable and high-risk populations in our society such as recent immigrants and black people, their perspectives should be considered. Some steps are being taken by individual researchers to illuminate these perspectives. The paper will discuss the findings of a project that examined the health care experiences of immigrant women in a Canadian province with a goal of illuminating health care needs of recent immigrant women and facilitating community capacity building to create positive change for more accessible health care. The data collection method was primarily focused group meetings and workshops held with the individual immigrant communities. Although the project was conducted with immigrants from five regions of the world, this paper will focus on the experiences of first generation immigrant women of African descent with emphasis on their perspectives on the process mothering in a multicultural society. The paper will discuss their childrearing needs and their attempt to address these needs within the spaces of multiculturalism, the two predominant ones being the Canadian culture and that of their countries of origin. The paper will conclude with some suggestions for change at both the practitioner and policy level in order to effectively address the social and welfare needs of this population.