Meeting the challenges of the handicraft industry in Africa: Evidence from Nairobi

This article presents findings on observed productivity constraints of handicraft firms in Nairobi, Kenya. The goal is to help NGOs, intergovernmental organisations, and national governments in their efforts to foster local handicraft industries in Africa and beyond. One-hundred and two respondents were interviewed about their business, cost structure, hiring practices, and other intra-industry relationships. This article points out a number of practical problems hindering productivity and limiting livelihoods, including problematic labour practices, conditions of adverse selection, the context of proprietary information in small scale manufacturing, and the tendency of the industry toward hypercompetition.     

Can Policy to Address Some Disability Rights Mitigate Weak Approaches to Others?

Governments prioritize some rights over others because of policy constraints. We ask whether differential disability policy priorities can readdress other unrealized rights when applied to services for people with disabilities in boarding houses in Australia. The housing is inappropriate to their support needs and breaches their immediate right to unsegregated housing. Findings about the government-funded support showed that their well-being improved, but the housing increased their support needs and reduced their eligibility for suitable housing, implying that support policies that prioritize progressive realization rights are not successful where immediate realization rights to housing remain unaddressed. These findings about the negative social outcomes from ignoring human rights hierarchies have implications for policy priorities.     

Beyond the Comfort Zone? County Government Collaboration with Private-Sector Organizations to Deliver Services

Despite burgeoning research on collaboration, the preference and choice of public managers to partner with other public-sector institutions versus private-sector organizations has received comparatively little attention. This study proposes that public managers are inclined to partner with other government agencies, i.e., within their “comfort zone,” and presents a model to explain when they may go beyond the comfort zone to collaborate with private establishments. Using an embedded case study design, this study examines how the professional background of the manager, characteristics of the government organization, and the “market” of potential partners influence the reported incidence of collaboration with nongovernmental actors.     

Religious Intelligence

Sacred rituals and symbols can act as force multipliers that motivate and constrain the effectiveness of actors. Religious intelligence involves an assessment of how these rituals and symbols affect combat operations. The fourfold challenge faced by the religious intelligence analysts is to ascertain how prominent a role religion will play in a given conflict, what the relevant sacred phenomena are, how salient they are for the specific religious communities present, and how they will affect a given conflict. The case studies that form the core of this article highlight three issue areas open to religious intelligence collection and analysis, and exhibit variation in the ability of intelligence analysts to correctly assess those religious factors. Egyptian and Israeli decision making prior to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War illustrates how information about sacred time can influence war initiation. The diverging outcomes of two counterinsurgency operations at the same sacred site, “Operation Blue Star” (1984) and “Operation Black Thunder” (1988), demonstrate the utility of intelligence about the parameters of sacred space. A final case study explores the U.S. failure to grasp the importance of religious authority in the Iranian Revolution. I conclude by considering the actors best suited for gathering and processing religious intelligence. Religious intelligence requires interdisciplinary teams that combine expertise in religion, area studies, and military operations.     

Psyoping Hezbollah: The Israeli Psychological Warfare Campaign During the 2006 Lebanon War

The 2006 War between Israel and Hezbollah had a significant component of PSYOP. For the first time in its military history Israel deployed PSYOP as an inseparable part of its military operations. The performance of the PSYOP unit was less than satisfactory due to organizational factors and the general conduct of the war itself. This article analyzes the goals, the themes, and the delivery channels used throughout the PSYOP campaign. An attempt is made to answer the key question of whether this effort was effective.     

On The Receiving End: The Governance of the Police in Britain

Based on direct observation over a five‐year period, the article paints an intimate picture of how the police in Britain are governed. It analyses the complexity of the economic and political environment in which the police have to work: the insecure funding platform; the stream of initiatives, targets and official guidelines; the delicacy of handling community sensitivities; the inherent opaqueness of the national ‘tripartite’ system of governance; and the constant challenge of making balanced judgements under conflicting pressures. The central theme that runs through the article (which follows on logically from two previous articles published in Political Quarterly) is that of a ‘managerialist’ political class, with a distinctive ideology and mode of control, trying to get a policy grip on the real world of service delivery: in this instance, policing. Unlike the previous two articles, which had a top‐down focus, the emphasis here is primarily on how the thicket looks to those who have to navigate their way through it.     

Recruiting,Retention, and Race in the Military

In the United States (U.S.) military, race and/or ethnicity serve as identifiable factors in recruitment, promotion, and retention patterns. African Americans are overrepresented especially in the Army and within the enlisted corps relative to their proportion within the civilian population. And while Hispanics constitute the fastest growing segment of the workforce as well as in society, they are underrepresented in the military.

This study confirms the disparity of underrepresented minorities within the officer corps. It explored the recruiting and retention challenges with certain groups, the role of race and/or ethnicity, and what the U.S. military can do to attract underrepresented groups to its officer corps. As part of the discourse, the author also draws from similar experiences of militaries within the international community.