Giving Afghan Women a Voice: women's writing in Afghanistan

This article considers how far women's rights have improved in Afghanistan since the intervention by the international community in 2001. It examines this question through the author's experience of working with an Afghan women's writing group. It looks at the tension between allowing Afghan women to voice their experiences, and the danger of their writing embracing depictions of the female as ‘victim’. It concludes that while depictions of Afghan womanhood may appear to promote ‘negative’ images, the women themselves offer positive role models.     

The use and non-use of policy appraisal tools in public policy making: an analysis of three European countries and the European Union

The increasing complexity of policy problems, coupled with the political desire to base new policies on the foundation of firm evidence, has accelerated the development of policy assessment tools. These range from complex computer models and cost benefit analysis through simple checklists and decision trees. In the last decade, many governments have established formal policy assessment systems to harness these tools in order to facilitate more evidence-based policy making. These tools are potentially widely available, but to what extent are they used by policy makers and what becomes of the evidence that they generate? This paper addresses these questions by studying the empirical patterns of tool use across 37 cases in three European countries and the European Commission. It uses a simple classification of tools into advanced, formal and simple types. It finds that even when tools are embedded in policy assessment systems, their use is differentiated and on the whole very limited, in particular when it comes to more advanced tools. It then explores these patterns from contrasting theoretical perspectives to shed light on why, when and how different policy assessment tools are used in the policy process.     

How the Global Pandemic Intensifies Vulnerabilities for Colombia's Women Social Leaders

Women social leaders in Colombia say that the biggest danger posed by the global pandemic comes not from contracting the virus, but rather from non-state armed groups taking advantage of the quarantine to violently pursue social and territorial control. This article details three phenomena that highlight how existing vulnerabilities for women social leaders have been sharpened by the global pandemic: (a) women's community work increases while state and institutional support decrease; (b) armed groups' ability to target violence increases while women's ability to self-protect decreased; and (c) armed groups' ability to act with impunity is increasing as access to justice is limited.     

Can Tourism Promote Inclusive Growth? Supply Chains,Ownership and Employment in Ha Long Bay,Vietnam

Inclusive growth is contested yet adopted by the World Bank to reduce poverty and inequality through rapid economic growth. Research has tested inclusive growth in sectors including agriculture, but few studies apply it to tourism which is significant for many developing countries. The paper interrogates tourism-led inclusive growth: supply chains, economic linkages/leakage, ownership, employment and expenditure. It draws from fieldwork in Vietnam where tourism has rapidly developed with partial economic benefits for local communities, but does not appear to fall within the inclusive growth paradigm. It is unclear if tourism-led growth will become any more inclusive in the short-to-medium term.     

Federalism and university governance in Canada

There is increasing interest in how universities are governed, externally and internally (Austin and Jones 2016). Drawing on a comparative case study of the governance of six major Canadian universities and the literature, this article describes the impact of federal research and innovation policy and programs on universities and reflects on Ottawa's role. We suggest that the federal government participates in the external governance of universities, but in a way that differs significantly from provincial governments. Canadian federalism appears to be generally beneficial for university autonomy and examination of its operation sheds light on factors that enable universities to sustain their autonomy.     

Press coverage of lone-actor terrorism in the UK and Denmark: shaping the reactions of the public,affected communities and copycat attackers

Following 9/11, Al-Qaeda-orchestrated plots were considered the greatest threat to Western security and sparked the coalition’s war on terror. Close to a decade later, the post-9/11 threat landscape had shifted significantly, leading then CIA-director Leon Panetta to describe “the lone-wolf strategy” as the main threat to the United States. Subsequent lone-actor attacks across the West, including the cities of London, Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Ottawa and Charleston, further entrenched perspectives of a transformed security landscape in the “after, after-9/11” world. The unique features of lone-actor terrorism, including the challenges of interdiction and potential of copycat attacks, mean that the media is likely to play a particularly important role in shaping the reactions of the public, affected communities and copycat attackers. This article presents findings from a content analysis of British and Danish newspaper reporting of lone-actor terrorism between January 2010 and February 2015. The study highlights that lone-actor terrorism is framed, with national variations, as a significant and increasing problem in both countries; that Islamist lone-actors are often represented as distinct from far-right lone-actors; and that some reporting, despite relatively limited amplification of specific terrorist messages, potentially aids lone-actors by detailing state vulnerabilities to attacks.     

Deliberation and Complexity of Thinking. Using the Integrative Complexity Scale to Assess the Deliberative Quality of Minipublics

The quality of deliberative conversations are dependent on citizens compliance with deliberative norms yet there is a lack of methods to assess norm compliance in discussions. Here, the psychological construct of complexity of thinking is claimed to conceptually correspond to the deliberative conversational ideal and adopted as a measurement of deliberative norm compliance. The hypothesis that citizens' complexity of thinking increases as a result of participation in deliberative conversations was tested in a minipublic case study in Sweden. Participants' complexity of thinking was assessed before and after deliberation by responding to an open‐ended question about the topic of debate. Manual coding was used to rate participants integrative complexity. The result confirms the hypothesis, which serves as an indicator of deliberative quality. The study also demonstrates that women get higher increases in complexity, as do highly agreeable individuals and those who hold more liberal views. The findings demonstrate the potential usefulness of integrative complexity as a measurement of deliberative quality.     

Negotiating the review process: a CIA guide to intelligence analysis, 1970

The literature on intelligence analysis contains many references to the ‘review process’, the mechanism by which analysts’ drafts are converted into corporate products. Analysts whose drafts consistently navigate the process quickly and smoothly are regarded as star performers. Divining the practical meaning of organizational definitions of ‘good’ analysis and the personal preferences of specific senior reviewers is not easy, however. Analysts occasionally commit their understanding of reviewers’ stylistic preferences to paper, effectively providing style guides to help others. This essay presents and explains the development and implications of one such guide, which was designed to help analysts in CIA’s Office of Strategic Research in the early 1970s.