Inspire Magazine: A Critical Analysis of its Significance and Potential Impact Through the Lens of the Information,Motivation, and Behavioral Skills Model

This article presents an analysis of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's English language publication Inspire that was conceptualized and conducted on the basis of the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) framework. The IMB model has been widely tested, validated, and applied across a range of behavior change interventions, and provides both a conceptual and analytic framework to examine the range and quality of content featured across the 11 issues of Inspire that were published and distributed online starting in July of 2010. Inspire has been implicated in multiple instances of terrorism cases in the U.S. and its impact and potential can be analyzed on the extent to which it effectively targets core attitudes, perceptions of social normative support for violence, and its regular featuring of behavioral skills such as bomb making, weapons training, and emphasizing a creative and do-it-yourself ethos.     

The Ubiquitous Book Review

If case-notes are considered to be a lowly form of legal literature, book reviews could come even lower. Law book-reviews, whenever themselves the subject of legal commentary, are seen to be done badly. Lacking the discipline of the legal opinion, law-book reviewing ranges between the pedantic and the perfunctory, with room for indulgence in the personal and the polemic. There are no established techniques for law-book reviewing. There are no criteria for critical appreciation. Law-book reviewing, which lacks any discernable ground-rules, proceeds intuitively without reference to explicit standards or established expertise. This is odd because the literary tradition of book-reviewing was first established by a lawyer whose concept was that of putting books on legal trial. The literary review is thus strongly grounded in legal method. The present shortcomings of the law-book review denote not only literary shortcomings but also failures of legal method. The conventional law review provides the evidence, no less than it carries much of the blame for the decline in law-book reviewing. One obvious standard of reference for the declining law-book review continues to be the higher forms of literary review. This standard calls for renewed interest in law and literature.     

Testimonies in Light: Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground

Nan Goldin: Devil's Playground, recently shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, represents the first retrospective in the United Kingdom for this American photographer who has lived, and photographed, internationally. Renowned for her photographs of the intimate lives of her friends-herself and the queer and drugs/bohemian communities-Goldin has taken a startling aesthetic/pictorial turn in her new photography. Prosser evaluates Goldin's career and the changes in it, and considers where her photography leaves the documentary tradition from which she arose. Charting in particular a trajectory towards light in her oeuvre, and working with the notion of testimony rather than documentary, Prosser suggests that Goldin has moved from an empathetic but critical representation of gender roles to a spiritual, accepting and visionary perspective on life and loss. His readings of photographs are focused on those from the exhibition and the curating of the exhibition is considered.     

The Women's Movement and Government

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.