Resources on East Timor

Abstract

Until recently information in the United States on East Timor and the Indonesian occupation was scarce and usually outdated; more English-language material has been available in Australia and Britain. The wide international distribution of the videotape of the Indonesian Army's massacre of more than 270 innocent Timorese civilians in the Santa Cruz Cemetery (12 November 1991) contributed greatly to increasing international awareness of East Timor's plight. More importantly, the publicity surrounding the massacre revitalized solidarity groups around the world. As the groups expanded, so did the literature on East Timor. It is noteworthy that, aside from a few scholarly works, almost all of the available literature on East Timor has been written by activists of one sort or another.     

Dependency today—finance,firms, mafias and the state: A review of Susan Strange's work from a developing country perspective

The movements of political protest, competitive elections and the installation of new regimes are widely regarded as the most significant political upheaval to shake Africa since political independence. The impression is often given that this transformation has also seen the sweeping away of the old guard of autocratic leaders. The image of renewed leadership does not however correspond with reality. Taking the leaders that were in office in 1990 at the beginning of the democratisation movement, the article traces their subsequent history. It finds that half still hold the highest office, having for the most part successfully transformed themselves into 'democratic' leaders. This remarkable success story is examined, for the purpose of this article, from a voluntarist perspective, that is, the tactics that the incumbents pursued so as to remain in office are the focus. Continuing in the tradition of Sandbrook, and Jackson and Rosberg's work on 'personal rule',1 it constitutes a primer on how to hang on to power against the odds.     

Resettle: a significant new step in an emerging pathway that manages risk and addresses need in high-risk personality disordered offenders on their release into the community

Abstract

This paper will describe an innovative UK service development, Resettle, which is designed to address the needs and risks of personality disordered offenders who are released into the community from prison and whose high risks of harm and re-offending are linked to their personality disorder (PD). All the cases worked with are subject to Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA). This non-residential, intensive community-based service is nationally funded jointly by the Department of Health and Ministry of Justice, originally as part of the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) programme for high-risk offenders. Resettle became operational in 2008. It is currently being independently evaluated via a randomised control trial that is due to complete in March 2013. Formal outcome data are, therefore, not yet available, however, the developing model of intervention based on experience and learning to date is described alongside the policy and service context for this area of work.     

The genetic and environmental overlap between aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behavior in children and adolescents using the self-report delinquency interview (SR-DI)

Purpose

This study investigated genetic and environmental commonalities and differences between aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behavior (ASB) in male and female child and adolescent twins, based on a newly developed self-report questionnaire with good reliability and external validity -- the Self-Report Delinquency Interview (SR-DI).

Methods

Subjects were 780 pairs of twins assessed through laboratory interviews at three time points in a longitudinal study, during which the twins were: (1) ages 9-10 years; (2) age 11-13 years, and (3) age 16-18 years.

Results

Sex differences were repeatedly observed for mean levels of ASB. In addition, diverse change patterns of genetic and environmental emerged, as a function of sex and form of ASB, during the development from childhood to adolescence. Although there was some overlap in etiologies of aggressive and non-aggressive ASB, predominantly in shared environmental factors, their genetic overlap was moderate and the non-shared environmental overlap was low.

Conclusions

Taken together, these results reinforced the importance of differentiating forms of ASB and further investigating sex differences in future research. These results should be considered in future comparisons between youth self-report and parental or teacher report of child and adolescent behavior, and may help elucidate commonalities and differences among informants.     

The Royal Navy,Intelligence and the Spanish Civil War: Lessons in Air Power, 1936–39

This article discusses the Royal Navy (RN)—Royal Air Force (RAF) feud concerning the use of air power in the round through an investigation of each service's appreciations of the lessons being learned about air power during the Spanish Civil War. It reveals that despite such bodies as the Joint Intelligence Committee existing, for the processing of operational and strategic intelligence, there was very little that was joint about the way air power lessons were being used to inform RN and RAF interwar preparations for future conflict. Not only were the RN and RAF rivals, which dragged out the process and skewed the results so that they became useless for planning, but in that non-joint age each service could use the results for its own separate purposes and avoid any synergy among the services for operational and strategic effectiveness.     

Habeas corpus: Bodies of evidence and performed litigiousness – the spectacle of Michael Jackson's trial

Abstract

Drawing on contemporary theorisation of the body and the ways in which the body is staged/performed, this article will consider the received legal tradition of the letter of the law as univocal and binding – enacted through the body of evidence and due process – and look at how, in the 2005 Michael Jackson trial, jurisprudence became imbricated with the staging of Jackson's multivalent body, the pornographic self-depiction of the child ‘victim’, and the television spectacle of dramatised court re-enactments, produced for such channels as E! Entertainment and Sky News. The implications of the latter (as opposed to the permitted live television coverage of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial in 1994) will be investigated in the light of Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra: in the case of the television re-enactments, the actual Santa Maria courthouse becomes displaced onto the world of the television set, where all the key members of the various legal teams, including Judge Rodney S. Melville, are played by professional actors. Edward Moss, who plays Michael Jackson, perpetuates and further ramifies the hyperreal performativity associated with the actual pop star, whose image has become so imbued with theatricality, media saturation and forensic prurience that he seems to have become a simulacrum of himself.     

Measuring media oriented terrorism

Although long established, media oriented terrorist events have not been conceptualized or measured in a coherent manner. To forward the empirical study of media oriented terrorism, a measure that can be applied to terrorist events or to terrorist groups was developed and employed to compare terrorist activity for twenty terrorist groups and two hundred terrorist events. The media orientation measure taps into five factors of media orientation and successfully differentiates high from low media orientated events and active and inactive media oriented terrorist groups. The single most important factor regarding any group's individual media orientation level was their base of operation. Terrorist groups that were engaged in regional struggles were found to be less media oriented. Despite the news value of death and injury, the terrorist group with the highest fatality and injury averages ranked ninth in its media orientation score indicating that death and injury was not a necessary indicator of media orientation. Scores further suggest that media savvy well-known terrorist groups did not pursue media oriented activity as a constant strategy.     

Police confirmation of use of force in Australia: ‘To be or not to be?’

Despite significant transgressions during encounters with Indigenous peoples and marginalised groups, all six state police organisations in Australia espouse the principle of minimum force and identify service and crime prevention as paramount in community interaction and intervention. This article offers some insight and perspective of police talk and thinking about the potential use or avoidance of force. The four Victoria Police focus groups, when confronted by the specific police use of force scenario, speak of the adrenalin rush and the need to achieve results, if reasonable and necessary by force, but also of the desire to control the situation and follow proper police procedures. Officers support ‘Safety First’ principles that advocate a cautionary and suspicious approach to the scenario combined with rational and methodical tactics rather than emotional responses. The reflective talk of individual officers about the hypothetical situation parallels actual behaviour when police collectively and visibly confront public disorder. Control and containment of the situation—whether the scenario or a major crowd disturbance—are paramount while time, in the form of acting slowly and adopting a low-key approach, can be seen as assets in achieving objectives. In both the scenario and police planning for collective action, a readiness to threaten force, rather than actually employ it, appears central to police thinking. Police justification of non-coercive tactics in certain situations can be revealing about their thinking processes in justifying force in other circumstances.

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