Classifying partner femicide

The heterogeneity of domestic violent men has long been established. However, research has failed to examine this phenomenon among men committing the most severe form of domestic violence. This study aims to use a multidimensional approach to empirically construct a classification system of men who are incarcerated for the murder of their female partner based on the Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994) typology. Ninety men who had been convicted and imprisoned for the murder of their female partner or spouse in England were identified from two prison samples. A content dictionary defining offense and offender characteristics associated with two dimensions of psychopathology and criminality was developed. These variables were extracted from institutional records via content analysis and analyzed for thematic structure using multidimensional scaling procedures. The resultant framework classified 80% (n = 72) of the sample into three subgroups of men characterized by (a) low criminality/low psychopathology (15%), (b) moderate-high criminality/ high psychopathology (36%), and (c) high criminality/low-moderate psychopathology (49%). The latter two groups are akin to Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart's (1994) generally violent/antisocial and dysphoric/borderline offender, respectively. The implications for intervention, developing consensus in research methodology across the field, and examining typologies of domestic violent men prospectively are discussed.     

Symptoms of trauma, perceptions of discrimination, and anger: a comparison between Australian indigenous and nonindigenous prisoners

Although the need for the development and provision of culturally appropriate rehabilitation programs for offenders is widely acknowledged, there is a lack of empirical data that can be used as a basis for the development of new programs. This article reports the findings of a comparison of indigenous and nonindigenous male prisoners on a range of measures relevant to the experience of anger by indigenous prisoners in Australia. The results suggest that indigenous participants are more likely to experience symptoms of early trauma, have greater difficulties identifying and describing feelings, and perceive higher levels of discrimination than nonindigenous prisoners. The implications of this work for the development of culturally appropriate and effective anger management programs for indigenous male prisoners are discussed.     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on reimagining governance for future crises and resilience

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This second suite of commentaries considers the challenges confronting governments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the decades to come with an increasingly broad lens: the need to understand and rethink the architecture of the state given recent and future challenges awaiting governments; the need to rethink government-civil society relations and policies to deliver services for increasingly diverse citizens and communities; the need for new repertoires and sensibilities on the part of governments for recognizing, anticipating, and engaging on governance risks despite imperfect expert knowledge and public skepticism; how the COVID-19 crisis has caused us to reconceive international and sub-national borders where new “borders” are being drawn; and the need to anticipate a steady stream of crises similar to the COVID-19 pandemic arising from climate change and related challenges, and develop new national and international governance strategies for fostering population and community resilience.     

Eliciting the Public's Budgetary Preferences: Insights from Contingent Valuation

Contingent valuation studies can provide useful insights for designers and users of surveys eliciting the public's comprehensive budgetary preferences. Such studies attempt to elicit the public's monetary valuations of specific nontraded goods to support decisions of managers in the public sector. Although controversial, these surveys provide much useful methodological analysis and evidence relevant to avoiding bias and unreliability of surveys intended to elicit more general budgetary preferences. Significantly refined over the past several decades, the underlying methodology shows substantial promise for further development. Collaboration of specialists knowledgeable about public budgeting and finance with specialists in economics, survey methods, and market research could contribute greatly to designing, implementing, and evaluating surveys of the citizenry's public budgetary preferences.     

Visa Diplomacy

The consular element of national diplomatic power plays an essential, but often overlooked role in international relations. This is unfortunate, since the process of globalization places increasing importance on so-called “low politics”—trade, commerce, tourism, migration—all traditional consular areas of interest. This study examines the visa component of consular diplomacy as an integral device in the conduct of international relations. The simple visa serves an important purpose in international relations and is a well-used, but little studied, instrument of foreign policy in today's system of sovereign states.

In this article, “visa diplomacy” is defined as the use of visa issuance or denial at an individual, group, and interstate level, to influence another state's policies. Although possessing limitations, visa diplomacy is an available signaling and retorsion instrument which makes it a viable policy option in the arena of international affairs. At the operative level, it links an individual or group to its sovereign country and respective national policies. Denial or issuance at the individual or group level can have outcomes on overall interstate interactions as illustrated in the cases selected for this study. The conclusion assesses where the use of visa diplomacy seems most effective in international relations.     

Russia's African Toolkit: Digital Influence and Entrepreneurs of Influence

Today, Russian influence on the African continent is still anecdotic compared to the People's Republic of China, the United States, and former colonial powers, such as France. Yet, Moscow has committed to reasserting itself as an alternative pole of influence to China and Western countries in the eyes of some African elites. This article analyzes two key components of Russia's African toolkit: its media outlets such as RT and Sputnik, which have managed to impose themselves on the African media landscape, and its entrepreneurs of influence, in charge of influence campaigns of different scopes. The article contends that Russia's media success relies more on the appropriation of its informational content by African actors with their own political agendas than on Moscow convincing African audiences of the legitimacy of its foreign policy or political model, and that entrepreneurs of influence may play a useful, but limited, role in testing new parameters of influence.