Rural development projects in LDCs: Appraisal,participation and sustainability

Evidence on the performance of development projects shows that sustainability is seldom achieved. Project sustainability is influenced by ecological, social, political and economic systems. However, the blueprint approach to project choice tends to incorporate sustainability into the project cycle by considering only economic and environmental systems. This is done by adopting elaborate methodologies such as expanded CBA and EIA. This approach is unlikely to lead to sustainable projects. The ‘participation approach’ is more sensitive to the social and political systems than the blueprint approach. It involves people in decision-making and sees the achievement of sustainable projects as the result of people's empowerment and self-reliance. However, under certain circumstances, this approach can lead to environmentally unsustainable projects. Smaller scale projects tend to bring about sustainability, but government control might be needed to ensure this. Social obstacles exist in implementing participation but occur for top-down projects as well. Problems exist in combining the bottom-up and top-down approaches.     

The parliamentary elite in transition

Only two years after the critical elections of 27 March 1994, the Italian parliamentary election of 1996 marks another important step in the transformation of the political class. The extent of turnover is declining, and the renewal of the parliamentary elite shows some signs of stabilization. This article inquires into the differences in the sociological configuration of the new elite, and whether this means that new consolidated pathways to the parliamentary elite now already exist. The article analyzes the distribution of freshmen in the political class, the return of old backbenchers in the new political parties, the social and occupational background of MPs and, finally, their local and political experiences. In the final section, the article discusses some hypotheses about the perspectives on the recruitment of Italian MPs, focusing in particular on the effects of the structural crisis of political parties and the introduction of the plurality system. An empirically–derived typology of professionalization patterns is also provided.     

A Bloodless Guerrilla Warfare: Why U.S. White Leftists Renounced Violence Against People During the 1970s

Between 1968 and the late 1970s, a significant number of U.S. white leftist groups escalated their protest to armed struggle. After experimenting briefly with violence, they opted for low-intensity armed propaganda that targeted property and avoided hurting people. By contrast, European leftist groups and anti-colonial organizations in the U.S. made extensive use of antipersonnel violence. Why did U.S. leftists eschew attacks against civilians? Scholarship does not explain this case, as it focuses either on the internal dynamics of a single group or on structural variables. Conversely, this article addresses this question through a historical reconstruction and a multilevel analysis. The research identifies the critique and ensuing de-solidarization by the radical milieu as the main factor accounting for the restraint of violence. This article demonstrates that the radical milieu censored and isolated armed groups as soon as they escalated and began to endanger human lives. Therefore, in order to safeguard the solidarity pact with their constituencies, violent fringes moderated their repertoires of action. This article employs primary sources and original interviews with militants to support this claim and to assess the relevance of three concurrent factors: the trauma generated by the “townhouse incident,” the deterrence by law enforcement, and the militants’ socio-economic background.     

A Novel Forensic Investigation Applied to Bone Remains Exhumed near to Quirra Interforce Firing Range

The need to implement novel techniques, able to support a causal link between exposure and pathology, has been emerged over the recent years. The application of scanning electron microscope coupled with probe X‐ray microanalysis (by means of an energy‐dispersive spectroscopy) has been developed by our research group for the bone remains investigation. It was aimed to testify the exposure to microsized and nanosized pollutions, due to military activities in the Quirra interforce firing range, of a Sardinian shepherd, died of acute leukemia. Metallic debris with a combustive morphology and with an oncogenic potential has been surely detected inside his bone marrow canal. This novel technique has proved to be able to bring to light a source of past exposure preserved over time within the bone marrow canal. It can be useful for postmortem analyses, delivering a new avant‐garde approach to modern forensic science.     

Criminological and Medico-legal Aspects in Homicidal and Suicidal Sharp Force Fatalities

The interpretation of sharp force fatality dynamics may be difficult in some cases, but a contribution to analysis of the phenomenon may be provided by case studies. Therefore, the purpose of our study is focused on identifying, in observed sharp force fatalities, reliable parameters that can differentiate a homicidal and suicidal manner of death, with particular reference to criminological parameters. Data derived from sharp force fatality cases in Padua and Venice from 1997 to 2019, anonymized and collected in Excel, included personal, circumstantial, clinical, and psychopathological–criminological data, as well as crime scene investigation, necroscopic, and toxicological data. Statistical analyses were performed using chi-square and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. Possible predictors of homicide were analyzed by logistic regression. Six parameters (bloodstains distant from the body, clothing lacerations, hesitation/defense wounds, number of injuries, and potential motives) were significantly different in the two groups (p < 0.05). An independent statistical association between potential motives explaining the crime (p < 0.001; OR 27.533) and homicide on multiple logistic regression analysis was highlighted. The absence of clothing lacerations was inversely related to homicide (p = 0.002, OR 0.092). To the best of our knowledge, this is one of very few Italian studies concerning the differential diagnosis between homicidal and suicidal sharp force fatalities. The dynamics of the event is established in most cases by the integrated evaluation of data from crime scene investigation and the autopsy. Nevertheless, in an atypical scenario, a psychopathological–criminological analysis may provide essential elements, and particular attention should be given to the identification of potential explanatory motives.     

Lying on the Road Before Being Run Over: Vehicular Manslaughter,Suicide, or Accident? Two Case Reports and Literature Review

We present two apparent hit-and-run cases where two women were run over. The vehicles involved were subsequently traced and their owners charged with manslaughter. Autopsy evidence, scientific investigation of the scene and circumstances of the deaths, technical inspection of the vehicles, and DNA analysis strongly suggested that both victims were lying on the road before the accident. Case 1 was a suicide. In Case 2, the victim had fallen to the ground following acute alcohol intoxication. Victimological analysis was pivotal in reconstructing the dynamics of the events. We suggest that a hit-and-run fatality should not be regarded as a manslaughter case until each piece of evidence has been carefully considered. We also propose an interdisciplinary method of reconstructing run over occurrences based on the following three steps: (i) identify whether there was a primary impact when the victim was in an upright position; (ii) identify victim drug/alcohol intoxication and/or presence of acute or chronic disease or injury, which may have contributed to the impact; and (iii) consider suicide intent.     

Multi-Rater Agreement Using the Adapted Fracture Healing Scale (AFHS) for the Assessment of Tubular Bones on Conventional Radiographs: Preliminary Study*

Better understanding of the timing of fracture healing may help in cases of interpersonal violence but also of personal identification. The intra- and inter-rater agreement for the adapted fracture healing scale (AFHS) assessing the post-traumatic time interval on radiographs were tested. This is a preliminary study, providing essential information on method reliability for upcoming studies using the AFHS. Five raters (two radiologists, a forensic pathologist, an orthopedist, and an anthropologist) were presented with a test in three parts consisting of 85 radiographs (from 30 adults) of fractures of tubular bones in different stages of healing purposefully selected from more than 1500 radiographs. The raters were firstly asked to assess 15 features describing fracture healing as present, absent, or not assessable. Thereafter, the raters were asked to choose from the AFHS a single-stage best representing the observed healing pattern. The intra- and inter-rater agreement were assessed using single-rating, absolute agreement, two-way mixed-effects intra-class correlation (ICC) coefficients. The intra-rater ICC of radiologist 1 ranged from 0.80 to 0.94. The radiologists’ inter-rater ICC ranged from 0.68 to 0.74, while it ranged from −0.01 to 0.90 for the other raters. The good to excellent ICC among the radiologists and forensic anthropologist provides good foundation for the use of the AFHS in forensic cases of trauma dating. The poor to good results for the other physicians indicate that using the AFHS requires training in skeletal anatomy and radiology.     

Security and informality in Libya: militarisation without military?

ABSTRACT

The article interrogates the analytical purchase of the concept of militarism in the case of Libya, and its relationship to securitisation. While Libya is often associated with widely securitised threats to the international order, its military institutions have been viewed with suspicion and ambivalence across different phases of Libyan history, making of Libya an uneasy fit for standard categorisations of militarism. This prompts the question of whether and under what circumstances militarism can occur without and even against the military. Drawing on a historical-sociological analysis, the article shifts the focus to micropolitical dynamics and extra-institutional agency with a view to unpacking the complex entanglement of formal and informal armed actors in Libya’s hybrid security governance. The concepts of informalisation of militarism and militarisation of informality are used as analytical lenses to reconstruct the partial, failed, contested and hijacked attempts to build ‘modern’ military institutions in Libya. I suggest that the repertoire of militarism is not so much an end in itself, but a resource mobilised by local and international actors in a contentious field of state-building practices.     

Do Traffic Tickets Reduce Motor Vehicle Accidents? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper analyzes the effect of traffic tickets on motor vehicle accidents. Ordinary least squares (OLS) estimate may be upward biased because police officers tend to focus on areas where and periods when there is heavy traffic and thus higher rates of accidents. This paper exploits the dramatic increase in tickets during the Click‐it‐or‐Ticket campaign to identify the causal impact of tickets on accidents using data from Massachusetts. I find that tickets significantly reduce accidents and nonfatal injuries. I provide suggestive evidence that tickets have a larger impact at night and on female drivers.