Negotiating the “Drunken Aborigine”: Alcohol in Indigenous Autobiography

This article approaches the question of how Aboriginal Australians describe their own experiences of drinking alcohol, sometimes to excess, and how they recover, through a reading of seven autobiographies alongside the scholarship on Aboriginal drinking. The evidence contained in these life stories stresses personal factors and adds to the picture we glean from the scholarship, whether academic or governmental, epidemiological, anthropological or historical, which explains Aboriginal drinking habits in more social terms. Thus, the autobiographies themselves make an important intervention into the scholarship on Aboriginal drinking. Beyond this, negotiating with the stereotype of the “drunken Aborigine” is unavoidable for Aboriginal people who write about their drinking and these autobiographies represent a challenge to this popular image. This article examines a previously unexamined discourse on Aboriginal drinking that goes some way towards undermining the public representation of a drunken Aboriginal culture while simultaneously giving individual Aboriginal Australians greater voice in describing their past and current experiences.     

Access to information law and the stalled ‘winds of change’ in Zambia

Zambia, like a few other African countries, has been grappling with the adoption of the Access to Information (ATI) law over the past 25 years. This article argues that the Zambian approach towards easing access to public information has been faulty, because it is narrowly focused and this has resulted in the process stalling. The argument is made here, that the ATI law is part of a global social movement towards greater transparency. Furthermore, the article focuses on Zambia's approach to the law (whose push is dominated by executive control) and how that approach has impacted on good governance. The article also discusses how some countries have dealt with similar laws, before concluding that unless Zambia's move towards this law is broadened, whatever may be enacted in the future could be faulty.     

Implementation of the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management in Cambodia: effects of regime design

Over the past 20 years, a cluster of international environmental agreements has developed aiming at reducing the risks associated with production and use of chemicals. The Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) is the newest addition to this cluster and serves to guide efforts to meet the 2020 goal to use and produce chemicals in a way that minimizes significant adverse effects on human health and the environment. SAICM differs from other chemical and waste agreements on several key points: It is a policy framework that is legally non-binding; it comprises a broad scope of activities; and it allows for active participation of non-governmental stakeholders. A central aim of SAICM is to decrease the gap between developed and developing countries in terms of capacities to manage chemicals safely. This article examines the early implementation of SAICM, based on a national-level case study in Cambodia and interviews with SAICM stakeholders. The results show that SAICM has generated a clear momentum in Cambodia and has led to several implementation projects. Based on the interviews, the overall conclusion is that design features of the SAICM—its broad scope, multi-stakeholder participation and voluntary status—are appropriate for the purpose of improving chemicals management in a developing country like Cambodia. However, these features also bring about difficulties in measuring progress on implementation. The future development of SAICM therefore needs to balance the benefits of its key design features with the need to more effectively and precisely monitor progress toward the 2020 goal.     

Reviews

Rosalinde Sartorti, Pressefotografie und Industrialisierung in der Sowjetunion. Die Pravda 1925–33. Berlin and Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. 1981. 339 pp. 58 DM.

P. G. Hare, H. K. Radice and N. Swain (eds.), Hungary: A Decade of Economic Reform. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. xiv+257 pp. £15.00.

Philip Hanson, Trade and Technology in Soviet‐ Western Relations. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981. xiv + 271 pp. £20.

Peter Wiles (ed.), The New Communist Third World. London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982. 392 pp. £15.95.

Arthur J. Klinghoffer: The Angolan War: a study in Soviet policy in the Third World. Colorado: Westview Press Inc., 1980. viii + 229 pp. $22.50.

Morris Rothenberg: The USSR and Africa: new dimensions of Soviet global power. Washington: Advanced International Studies Institute, 1980. viii + 280 pp. $8.95 and $ 12.95.

Seweryn Bialer (ed.), The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy. Studies of the Research Institute on International Change, Columbia University. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press/London: Croom Helm, 1981. xviii + 441 pp. £14.95.

Igor Birman, Secret incomes of the Soviet state budget. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. 313 pp. DFL. 180.00, US $78.50.

James R. Millar, The ABCs of Soviet Socialism. University of Illinois Press, 1981. xvi + 215 pp. £8.72 paperback.

Adam B. Ulam, Russia's Failed Revolutions: from the Decembrists to the Dissidents. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981. vii + 453 pp. £10.00.

Richard B. Day, The ‘Crisis’ and the ‘Crash’: Soviet Studies of the West, (1917–1939). London: NLB, 1981. x + 300 pp. £9.50.

Bogdan Szajkowski (ed.), Marxist Governments: A World Survey, 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1981. xix + 822 pp. £20 per volume, £50 the set.

Thomas Remeikis, Opposition to Soviet Rule in Lithuania 1945–1980. Chicago: Institute of Lithuanian Studies Press, 1980. 680 pp. $15.00.     

Capitalism,uneven and combined development and the transhistoric

What is the status of Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development within Marxist theory and how might it be fruitfully employed by Marxists in international relations? Is uneven and combined development a transhistoric general abstraction or does it need rooting in the relations, processes, tendencies and counter-tendencies of a particular mode of production? This article rejects Justin Rosenberg's recently drawn conclusion that uneven and combined development is usefully understood as a transhistoric general abstraction that potentially offers the basis of a transhistoric theory of the international. Instead it questions the value of transhistoric categories for Marxist theory and pursues the argument that uneven and combined development is best understood within the relations, processes and tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, arguing that capitalist social relations and political forms are historically unique in their capacity to generate both combination and unevenness.     

Whose lives are worth more? Politicising research safety in developing countries

This article develops the ‘safety–emotion–power’ nexus and highlights the role of emotion in research by politicising the unequal power relationships between researchers and NGO staff members in defining danger and negotiating safety in their fieldwork. Drawing on the author's research experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, it argues that research touching on emotion-laden topics can inflict stress and pain on NGO staff members and their families. The ‘right to safety’ of NGO staff members is often compromised by researchers' ‘right to know’. The norms of conflict-avoidance also deter NGO staff members from negotiating safety. In addressing these issues, the article suggests three principles for taking account of emotional aspects of safety in research ethics.     

Post-motivational Progression and the Possibility of Aborting Protracted Crime

The idea for this article emerged from a cursory examination of the National Crime Victimization Survey (US Department of Justice, 1997–2004). Unbeknownst to the authors (and possibly to most of the readers) is a trend confirming that about 2/3 of all violent crimes in the United States end up as attempted crimes, as opposed to completed crimes. Equally intriguing is that international crime figures confirm, almost exactly, the US Survey statistics. If these figures are accurate, then criminologists and crime control agents should ask the question: if 2/3 of all violent crimes fail to materialize—for whatever reason—under their own weight, why cannot criminologists and crime control agents in the future develop a clinical competency that can exploit this failure and further reduce the completion rate of violent crime to technically zero? If that can be accomplished, then violent crimes can theoretically be aborted. Such a futuristic design should not be considered farfetched in light of the current advancements in today’s technology, including the military practice of laser-bombing a car speeding on the road several miles below, or the on going military testing of “shooting a missile with a missile”. This article focuses on the undiscovered, yet enormous, role of post-motivational criminology, which—when the desired clinical competency is developed—can literally change the trajectory of violent crimes and possibly abort them in progress. While this article cannot promise answers for the next decades, it can, at least, stimulate the criminological community to think beyond its traditional boundaries and to engage in quantum research consortiums that can study the dynamics of post-motivational progressions and eventually resolve why some bullets miss or can intentionally be made not to hit.     

Too much choice,too little impact: a multilevel analysis of the contextual determinants of preference voting

Abstract

Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.     

The Quality of Representation and Satisfaction with Democracy: The Consequences of Citizen-Elite Policy and Process Congruence

Citizen-elite congruence has long been considered an important yardstick for the quality of democracy. The literature on citizen satisfaction with democracy, however, has reduced congruence almost exclusively to one of its components, policy congruence. Just as citizens are considered to have positions on policy issues, there is growing scholarly interest in the preferences they have about the process of representation. Yet studies inquiring into the impact of the divergent preferences that citizens and elites have regarding the representational process thus far have been few and their results inconclusive. Combining new, unique data from the 2014 Belgian Election and Candidate Studies, we seek to address this lacuna. Our findings indicate that we cannot understand citizen satisfaction without also taking process into account—even as the policy gap has the greater effect. They should be of interest to scholars of democracy, those concerned about citizen disengagement from politics, and political practitioners.