The emerging EU peacebuilding framework: confirming or transcending liberal peacebuilding?

The European Union (EU) is now emerging as a major actor in regional and global peacebuilding. Yet its peacebuilding approach and practices are subject to some significant and familiar contradictions. In this article, we identify the basis for what may become an ‘EU peacebuilding framework’ (EUPF), and argue that, while it aspires to a ‘just and durable peace’ including practical tools and a normative framework, these need to be set in critical relief. The EU's nascent approach to building peace is compared and contrasted with the evolving liberal peacebuilding consensus and the much criticized statebuilding project which has recently emerged. This is evaluated against recent research focusing on developing a more sophisticated form of contextually relevant peacebuilding. Finally, we assess how the embryonic EUPF might contribute to the development of a just and durable peace, and ask what sorts of issues and dimensions this raises.     

Social role playing and moral judgment development

This study examined the relationship between social role playing and moral judgment development. Subjects were 197 students enrolled in introductory social science courses at a public junior/community college in a metropolitan area in southeast Florida. The 78 males and 119 females ranged in age from 17 to 66 years, with a mean age of 22. Rest's (1979a, 1979b) Defining Issues Test (DIT) was used to measure level of moral judgment. Social role playing was measured by the number of separate roles held by subjects in the past or present. Academic aptitude, socioeconomic status, age, and sex were included as control variables. Academic aptitude, age, and social role playing each had significant zero-order correlations with moral judgment, and social role playing added significantly to the explanation of moral judgment, controlling for academic aptitude and age. Implications of these results for the understanding of the development of moral judgment and for intervention programs are discussed.     

Order authorizing termination of certain life support systems

An elderly, severely brain-damaged patient was being ventilated and given nutrition and antibiotics intravenously in a medical center's critical care unit. Her legal guardian requested authorization to order that the respirator be withdrawn and the administration of nutrition and antibiotics be stopped. A Missouri circuit court ruled that, while public policy, as evidenced in the state's living will statute, permitted withdrawing the respirator, it apparently precluded withholding or withdrawing nutrition, hydration, or antibiotics.     

The green and the cool: Hybridity,relationality and ethnographic-biographical responses to intervention

Policy debates on conflict research, which are mostly directly used to develop practices of soft intervention (including conflict resolution, peacebuilding and statebuilding), emanate from common epistemic and ontological frameworks. Most have been produced and perpetuated by key institutions in the global North through their encounter with historical direct and structural violence, both North and South. Power has followed Enlightenment knowledge, along with its various biases and exclusions. Its progressive normative, political, economic and social assumptions about a ‘good society’ and an ‘international community’ have been fed through social science into the building of international institutions, IFIs and the donor system. Using a method called ethnographic biography (in which biography is broadly defined to include the bibliography produced by the subject, as well as interviews and discussions), this article illustrates how peace thinking is mutually constructed as both positive and hybrid, confirming earlier critical work. However, the research methods deployed to engage with the contextual production of knowledge by local scholar-practitioners are sorely underdeveloped. This is illustrated through an analysis of the work of ‘local’ conflict scholars on their own peacebuilding and statebuilding processes in Cyprus, Kosovo and Timor Leste.     

Communist Party of China and Human Rights Protection for Criminals

Protection of criminals'human rights is an important issue that has received full attention at home and abroad. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has always attached much importance to the protection of criminals'human rights. Since the founding of new China, the Party and the state have paid full attention to protecting the human rights of criminals.I.The CPC Has Set Great Store by the Protection of Criminals'Human Rights     

Jekyll or Hyde: what is statebuilding creating? Evidence from the ‘field’

As a response to the dynamics of state formation, statebuilding has not created model states in the last twenty years as was intended. Instead, the states that have emerged around the world are heavily contextually contingent. This is despite international attempts to shape them according to a common pattern, dominated by neoliberal models of statehood. This raises the question of what kind of hybrid states are actually forming as a result of the encounter between international statebuilding and local political dynamics? This article argues that international statebuilding aims to create neoliberal states and treats local political dynamics as dysfunctional. Yet from a local perspective the limitations of the statebuilding model are also apparent, as is the need for any locally legitimate state to be grounded in its context.     

The Inscription of Masculinity and Whiteness in the Autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract — This essay examines the interconnectedness of whiteness and heterosexual masculinity in the autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, EI pez en el agua [ A Fish in the Water ]. In this text Vargas Llosa critiques Peruvian racism and machismo, and in his self-portrait attempts to distance himself from the categories of whiteness and masculinity. But in so doing he in fact obscures the workings of race and gender not only in Peruvian society but in his own writing, where the self is implicitly asserted in opposition to an image of nature as the realm of the indigenous and the feminine.     

Short-term effects of restorative justice conferences on post-traumatic stress symptoms among robbery and burglary victims: a randomized controlled trial

Objectives

To examine the impact of face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) meetings led by police officers between crime victims and their offenders on victims’ post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Methods

Two trials conducted in London randomly assigned burglary or robbery cases with consenting victims and offenders to either a face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) in addition to conventional justice treatment or conventional treatment without a RJC. Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were measured with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) within 1 month of treatment for 192 victims. We assessed the prevalence and severity of PTSS scores following treatment, using independent sample t tests and chi square statistics. We further measured the magnitude of the differences between the groups, using effect size analyses.

Results

Analyses show that PTSS scores are significantly lower among victims assigned to RJC in addition to criminal justice processing through the courts than to customary criminal justice processing alone. There are overall 49 % fewer victims with clinical levels of PTSS, and possible PTSD (IES-R?≥?25). Main treatment effects are significant (t?=?2.069; p?Conclusions Findings suggest that restorative justice conferences reduce clinical levels of PTSS and possibly PTSD in a short-term follow-up assessment. Future research should include longer follow-up, larger and more stratified samples, and financial data to account for the cost benefit implications of RJ conferences compared to ordinary PTSS treatments.