The Irish republican army: An assessment of sectarianism

Although the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has been active for more than 25 years, interpretations of the motivation of the IRA are varied. For some, it is a sectarian organization engaged in a tit‐for‐tat campaign with Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. For others, it is a guerrilla army waging a military campaign against the British presence in Northern Ireland. This article assesses the degree to which the IRA was or was not engaged in sectarian activity between July 1969 and December 1993. Although the Irish Republican Army killed more than 340 Protestant civilians in this time period, this examination suggests that the IRA, in general, was not a sectarian organization.     

The First World War as Catalyst and Epiphany: The Case of Henry P. Davison

The experience of the First World War was central to the emergence of a trans-Atlantic elite committed to close collaboration and an international alliance, either formal or de facto, between Great Britain and the United States. The reactions to the conflict of Henry P. Davison, dominant partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, illustrate the manner in which the First World War was catalytic in the creation of an Atlanticist elite. Davison, moreover, experienced something like a personal epiphany during the war, metamorphosing from a hard-driving businessman into an international philanthropist who developed ambitious schemes to remake the world. For seven years, Davison energetically sought to affect the course, outcome, and consequences of the First World War. Fundamental to Davison's worldview were the desirability and necessity of Anglo–American collaboration, on which all his other plans were predicated. When the war ended, Davison proposed almost visionary schemes, on the one hand to provide massive American governmental and private economic assistance to finance European postwar relief and reconstruction efforts and, on the other, to establish an international Red Cross organization that would mount a massive campaign to eradicate global public health problems. Although abortive in the short term, in the longer run his plans proved prophetic, anticipating the post–Second World War Marshall Plan and World Health Organization.     

Dominant party systems: a framework for conceptualizing opposition strategies in Russia

This article explores the problems facing opposition political parties in Russia. In order to conceptualize the conditions in which opposition parties operate and which determine the strategies they adopt, the concept of dominant party systems is used as an analytical framework. Ideological flexibility, access to administrative resources, and the ability to mobilize key socio-economic groups (key factors in the maintenance of one-party domination) are all features associated with Russia's ‘dominant’ party, United Russia. It is argued that, whilst Russia is not a dominant party system along the lines of those which existed in Mexico and Japan, there are sufficient commonalities with such systems, in terms of the problems facing opposition political parties as to make comparison a useful exercise. The optimum strategies for opposition parties in dominant party systems (activist recruitment, ideological positioning and coalition-building) are identified and it is argued that these are all areas which Russian opposition parties need to address if they are to successfully challenge the regime and the ‘party of power’, United Russia.     

Civil society,democratization and development (II): Two country cases

Part II of this article applies the definition of ‘civil society’ and explores the hypotheses about its political role in the process of democratisation developed in Part I, in the context of two country case studies, South Korea and Zambia. These are chosen because of the contrasts in their developmental performance and in their level of socio‐economic development. In both countries, the forces of civil society played a major role in the transition to a democratic regime, but the prospects for sustainability vary. In the South Korean case, certain elements of civil society have grown along with the industrialization process and constitute a powerful force both to prevent an authoritarian reversion and to deepen the democratic process, in spite of the continuing strength of state elites left over from the ancien regime. The prospects for democratic sustainability are also improved by the maintenance of a growth momentum. In Zambia, however, the social and economic situations are still dire, the democratic elements of civil society are weak and divided and the state itself is in a ruinous condition. This leads one to be more pessimistic about the longer‐term prospects of democratic politics there. The article concludes by raising the issue of how democratic systems, once established, may be shaped to enhance both their political survival and their developmental capacity, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the state, political society and civil society.     

Terrorism Risk, Resilience and Volatility: A Comparison of Terrorism Patterns in Three Southeast Asian Countries

Objective

This article explores patterns of terrorist activity over the period from 2000 through 2010 across three target countries: Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Methods

We use self-exciting point process models to create interpretable and replicable metrics for three key terrorism concepts: risk, resilience and volatility, as defined in the context of terrorist activity.

Results

Analysis of the data shows significant and important differences in the risk, volatility and resilience metrics over time across the three countries. For the three countries analysed, we show that risk varied on a scale from 0.005 to 1.61 “expected terrorist attacks per day”, volatility ranged from 0.820 to 0.994 “additional attacks caused by each attack”, and resilience, as measured by the number of days until risk subsides to a pre-attack level, ranged from 19 to 39 days. We find that of the three countries, Indonesia had the lowest average risk and volatility, and the highest level of resilience, indicative of the relatively sporadic nature of terrorist activity in Indonesia. The high terrorism risk and low resilience in the Philippines was a function of the more intense, less clustered pattern of terrorism than what was evident in Indonesia.

Conclusions

Mathematical models hold great promise for creating replicable, reliable and interpretable “metrics” to key terrorism concepts such as risk, resilience and volatility.     

New methods for examining expertise in burglars in natural and simulated environments: preliminary findings

Expertise literature in mainstream cognitive psychology is rarely applied to criminal behaviour. Yet, if closely scrutinised, examples of the characteristics of expertise can be identified in many studies examining the cognitive processes of offenders, especially regarding residential burglary. We evaluated two new methodologies that might improve our understanding of cognitive processing in offenders through empirically observing offending behaviour and decision-making in a free-responding environment. We tested hypotheses regarding expertise in burglars in a small, exploratory study observing the behaviour of ‘expert’ offenders (ex-burglars) and novices (students) in a real and in a simulated environment. Both samples undertook a mock burglary in a real house and in a simulated house on a computer. Both environments elicited notably different behaviours between the experts and the novices with experts demonstrating superior skill. This was seen in: more time spent in high value areas; fewer and more valuable items stolen; and more systematic routes taken around the environments. The findings are encouraging and provide support for the development of these observational methods to examine offender cognitive processing and behaviour.