Howard, Downer and the Liberals' Realist Tradition

The successive Howard Governments sought not only to make foreign policy in response to new regional and global agendas, but to respond to and to seek to manage new forms of electoral challenge with new forms of nationalism. This has resulted in a set of important departures from the major Liberal tradition in international affairs, the claim to a realist approach to foreign policy, and has led to the need to manage the consequences of those departures. The boundary that realism sought to draw between the domestic and international politics, as the spheres of values and interests respectively, became increasingly blurred. In relations with the Asian region the expression of strong domestic (nationalist and internationalist) agendas led initially to distancing from Asian engagement. However, from 2002, a more realist-focused external policy led to new forms of state to state re-engagement in pursuit of national interests. In the commitment to military operations in Iraq, the Anzac legend is interpreted to supply nationalist legitimation which would not normally be required for wars fought for realist (i.e. defensive) reasons. A future Liberal prime minister would lack Howard's touch here. In the debate in the Liberal Party over defence doctrine, an attempt by the Defence Minister to reformulate the realist doctrine of Defence of Australia into an expeditionary construct was rejected.     

Parental Monitoring, Parental Warmth, and Minority Youths’ Academic Outcomes: Exploring the Integrative Model of Parenting

Guided by the integrative model of parenting, the present study investigated the relationship between parental monitoring and racial/ethnic minority adolescents’ school engagement and academic motivation as a function of parental warmth, and explored whether these associations varied for boys and girls. Participants (60 % female) were 208 sixth through eighth grade students (63 % African American, 19 % Latino, 18 % Multiracial) from an urban middle school in the Midwestern United States. Youth completed an in-school survey with items on parenting (parental monitoring, mothers’/fathers’ warmth), cognitive engagement (school self-esteem), behavioral engagement (school trouble), and academic motivation (intrinsic motivation). As hypothesized, mothers’ warmth enhanced the association between parental monitoring and youths’ engagement and motivation. No gender differences in these associations emerged. Fathers’ warmth strengthened the negative association between parental monitoring and school trouble, and this association was stronger for boys. Implications regarding the importance of sustaining a high level of monitoring within the context of warm parent–adolescent relationships to best support academic outcomes among minority youth are discussed.     

Prevent Strategies: The Problems Associated in Defining Extremism: The Case of the United Kingdom

As the United Kingdom has placed some of its Prevent strategy on a statutory footing and is proposing to introduce a Counter-Extremism Bill, this article argues that a legal definition of extremism must be carefully drafted to provide legal certainty. The main recommendation is that all forms of violent and nonviolent extremism comes under the definition, ensuring it is differentiated from activism. Activism may hold radical views counter to the mainstream opinion, but it is required in liberal democracies as it encourages healthy debate and can prevent the policing of thought in any government strategy or legislation.     

Interpreting the Threshold Criteria under section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989 – the House of Lords decision in Re B1

The casenote considers the decision in Re B which confirms the threshold criteria in establishing the likelihood of future harm under section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989 and clarifies the civil standard of proof.     

Surveillance and International Terrorism Intelligence Exchange: Balancing the Interests of National Security and Individual Liberty

Using the revelations Edward Snowden passed over to the press regarding the actions of the U.S.’s National Security Agency and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters and their use of the Prism project, this article examines the law surrounding intelligence gathering in the U.S. and UK. Underpinning the analysis is the legal principle of proportionality as applied to balancing the interests of national security and individual liberties. After examining intelligence exchange procedures, which for the UK is through negotiated agreements between national security agencies and through the European Union’s policing agency, Europol, the main part of the article discusses legal challenges that have been made regarding surveillance and the use of anti-terror laws on citizens and the rationale behind the judicial decisions made in both the U.S. and UK jurisdictions. The argument forwarded is that there is a requirement for wide preventative powers being granted to counter-terrorism agencies and that the interests of national security and individual liberty are inclusive and, as shown by the cases covered in this article, we should rely on the judiciary to perform their function in applying proportionality to each case on its own merits.     

Shaved for battle—skinheads target America's youth

I explore whether newspapers that represent regions experiencing "local casualties," that is, fatalities from an international violent event, give greater coverage to the incident. Research suggests that local casualties influence domestic politics, yet scholars have given little attention to either the influence of local casualties on reporting or the impact of international events on local press coverage. I examine the effect of local casualties on local media by analyzing the frequency of newspaper coverage of the October 2000 terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. Using a variety­ of techniques, including random effects logit and repeat failure hazard analysis, I find that newspapers from areas that experienced casualties from the Cole attack were more likely to report on the bombing, even when controlling for paper-specific and temporal effects. Driven by community casualties, variation in local media atten­tion to an international news story may help to explain why the effects of international events on individual attitudes and domestic political effects vary geographically, a necessary condition for institutional arguments for the democratic peace.     

Communitarianism as a Blind Alley? A Reply to Lacey and Frazer

This article seeks to challenge the interpretation of communitarianism offered by Lacey and Frazer (Politics, Vol. 14 No.2). By developing a theory of community it is possible to overcome the problems which they highlight, and to demonstrate that communitarianism, properly understood, is a philosophy which can frame much useful debate in political theory.