Saving NATO: Renunciation of the Article 5 Guarantee

The purpose of this article is to offer a radical proposal: NATO should unleash its potential as the world's premier cooperative and collective security organization by stepping down from being a European collective defense alliance. In other words, I argue that without renouncing territorial security guarantees in Europe, NATO will sacrifice its effectiveness in the new security environment.     

Women’s perspectives on the value of a father’s initiative in shifting gendered practices within families

This paper explores the qualitative perspectives of women about a community embedded fathers’ initiative in Northern England. Projects to improve the well-being of men and their children are less common within the landscape of parent and child support, with mothers more often being the target recipients. Asking women about their perceptions of an initiative for fathers then offers original insights from women who are positioned as ‘related outsiders’, in that they were ‘outside’ the project but ‘inside’ the family and community. Findings suggest that women are able to see the positive impact of such a project, identifying that it offers a shared space for men and children, time for mothers without their children and can help with shifting roles and attitudes around childcare and emotional labour in the home. The initiative was also seen by the women as offering men more healthy means of coping, including men moving away from traditional hegemonic practices, which in turn shifted some women’s long held gendered beliefs about men as fathers. This research then offers a relational gendered backstory to a father’s initiative, demonstrating how such initiatives can potentially ‘undo’ gender and the positive implications this could have for families.     

HMG, AIOC and the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis: In defence of Anglo-Iranian

At the interface of big business and government, with whom does influence and responsibility lie? Rarely is the answer clear-cut, yet accounts of the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis of 1948-54 have often roundly blamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) for British mishandling of it. This article seeks to redress the balance. Whilst no apologia for AIOC policy, it contends that HMG should shoulder much more responsibility than hitherto allowed. From clandestine partnership through to sacrificial pawn, the government used the company as an instrument of foreign policy as it sought to marry the protection of AIOC interests in Iran with wider concerns for combating communism and promoting the Anglo-American 'special relationship'.     

Effective approaches to regulate mobile advertising: Moving towards a coordinated legal,self-regulatory and technical response

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse about the issue of privacy in the mobile advertising domain. The article discusses the fundamental principles and information practices used in digital environments for protecting individuals' private data. Major challenges are identified that should be addressed, so that fair information principles can be applied in the context of m-advertising. It also points out the limitations of these principles. Furthermore, the article discusses a range of models that is available for regulating the collection, use and disclosure of personal data, such as legislation, self-regulation and technical approaches. It is intended to promote an effective approach to improve consumer privacy in the mobile advertising domain.     

Penal Boundaries: Banishment and the Expansion of Punishment

We use this article to argue for greater recognition of legally imposed spatial exclusion—banishment—as a (re)emerging and consequential social control practice. Although the new social control techniques that entail banishment are buttressed by a blend of civil, administrative, and criminal law, they are best understood as punitive in nature. This argument is supported by two empirical findings. First, interviews with the banished indicate that spatial exclusion often has significant negative consequences akin to those identified by Sykes (1958 ) in his seminal account of the pains of imprisonment. Second, court data show that the growing use of civil and administrative banishment has increased the number of criminal cases involving allegations of noncompliance. These findings suggest that analysts of punishment might usefully broaden their focus to include phenomena that combine civil, criminal, and legal authority, and are not defined as punishment by their advocates.     

Motivations for becoming a police officer: Re-assessing officer attitudes and job satisfaction after six years on the street

Few studies had examined the stability of motivations for becoming a police officer over time, especially among minority and female officers. Moreover, research had not explored the links between original motivations and job satisfaction, a likely proxy measure of motivation fulfillment. The current research was a follow-up to Raganella and White (2004) who examined motivations among academy recruits in the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Using the same survey and analysis, this study re-examined motivations among officers from the same NYPD recruit class after six years on the job, and explored both motivation stability and the relationships among motivations and job satisfaction. Results suggested that motivations have remained highly stable over time, regardless of officer race/ethnicity and gender. Findings also suggested that White male officers were most likely to report low job satisfaction, and that there is a link between low satisfaction and unfulfilled motivations. Moreover, dissatisfied officers were much less likely to have expressed strong commitment to the profession through their original motivations, suggesting that low commitment up front may lead to low satisfaction later on. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for police departments, particularly with regard to recruitment and retention practices and efforts to achieve diversity.     

To execute or not to execute? Examining public support for capital punishment of sex offenders

In the 1990s, states enacted a plethora of new “get tough” laws targeting sex crime. These included extending the death penalty—a punishment typically reserved for murderers—to convicted sex offenders. Little attention, however, has been given to explaining why these tougher responses emerged and, in particular, whether the public supported extending the use of the death penalty to sex offenders. The goal of this paper was to examine whether public perceptions about executing sex offenders accorded with the punitive shift in policy and, more broadly, to contribute to scholarship on the death penalty. To this end, this paper examined data from a 1991 national public opinion poll, conducted just prior to the punitive shift in sex crime policies. The study found that views about executing sex offenders depended heavily on whether the victim was a child, that support for executing sex offenders was substantially lower than for executing murderers, and that few social and demographic divides differentially predicted support for executing sex offenders versus murderers. Implications of the study are discussed.     

NATO Special Operations: Promise and Problem

NATO special operations forces (SOF) are at a crossroads as the NATO role in Afghanistan winds down. After more than a decade of development, NATO SOF have greatly increased their ability to operate together in the field and in headquarters. If the alliance continues to emphasize SOF development, these forces can play a major role in future NATO campaigns, particularly outside Europe. Moreover, SOF can be maintained effectively in times of austerity. Yet intelligence sharing, particularly in real time, is currently one of the major limitations on NATO SOF, creating divisions between United States and United Kingdom on one hand and much of the rest of NATO on the other. In order to make truly effective use of SOF the alliance needs to make fundamental changes to its decades old system for sharing intelligence.