The incompatibility of peacemaking and military power

Since the 1990s, the Sino-Cameroonian relationship has grown rapidly. Today, China plays a key role in Cameroon's economic development, particularly in regards to infrastructure projects. However, in the last few years, Yaoundé's partnership with Beijing has encountered an increasing number of obstacles. Behind the warm pro-China rhetoric, the Cameroonian government has become more willing to rebalance their country's external relations, in favour of both its traditional partners and other emerging economies.     

The Federal Impact on Early Postwar Suburbanization

ABSTRACT

Researchers agree that, in Canada and the United States, federal policy with respect to mortgage finance encouraged suburbanization in the early postwar period. However, direct evidence has been lacking. Unique mortgage file data for 1951 for two Canadian cities, Hamilton, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia, make it possible to assess this claim, and related claims. They show that the impact of federal mortgage assistance was similar in direction in both cities, but much more striking in Hamilton: federal involvement encouraged suburbanization, reinforced existing broad patterns in the social geography of the city, and increased the amount of income segregation at the scale of specific neighborhoods and suburban subdivisions. The broad generalizations that previous researchers have made about the impact of federal mortgage policy are confirmed, but the magnitude of that impact could vary enormously and cannot be assumed in particular cases.     

Policy,Practicalities, and PACE s. 24: The Subsuming of the Necessity Criteria in Arrest Decision Making by Frontline Police Officers

PACE, as amended by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, establishes a complex framework of factors that police officers must consider during arrest decision making. Officers must possess a reason to arrest, it must be necessary to arrest for that reason, and they must give at least a ‘cursory consideration’ to alternatives. Based on a four‐year ethnographic study of frontline officers from two forces in Northern England, we argue that the 2005 reforms have not achieved their aims. The new regime tasks officers with undertaking a complex legal assessment prior to arrest, but officers are often confused about the necessity criteria which, moreover, is typically a minor consideration in contrast to demanding practical and policy pressures. This means that unlawful and non‐human‐rights‐compliant arrests continue to be regularly made and, equally significantly, many suspects are escaping the criminal justice system because officers are not considering arrest alternatives.     

Developments in public affairs in Australia

• This paper discusses the integrated public affairs model most common in Australian companies, and its rationale. It describes some key characteristics of the function, drawing on a comprehensive survey of public affairs departments in late 2003. The function has become more senior and strategic, more closely aligned to business imperatives and with stable or growing budgets. It identifies areas of increased attention for practitioners, including support for organization transformation and culture change, stakeholder relations as a line, as well as staff function, reputation management and sustainability reporting.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Military,the media and the invasion of Grenada

The article begins by discussing trends in official U.S. information policies before the invasion of Grenada (1983), describing the tendency towards secrecy and limited disclosure. The immediate political background to the invasion is outlined, including an examination of attempts to produce a plausible justification for military intervention. The management of the media both immediately before and after the invasion is detailed and the article concludes by assessing the lessons and aftermaths of the information war fought during the Grenada episode.The Grenada ban is not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern ... (Time, 7 November 1983)     

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.     

The Difference Law Makes: Domestic Atrocity Laws and Human Rights Prosecutions

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely been unexamined. That is surprising given that international legal prohibitions against human rights atrocities are designed to be enforced by domestic courts applying domestic criminal law. We argue that domestic criminal laws against genocide and crimes against humanity facilitate human rights prosecutions in post‐authoritarian states by helping to overcome formal legal roadblocks to prosecution, such as retroactivity, amnesties, immunities, and statutes of limitations. Using original data on domestic atrocity laws and human rights prosecutions in new democracies, we find that atrocity laws increase the speed with which new democracies pursue prosecutions, as well as the overall numbers of trials they initiate and complete.