Emotions,reason, and character

Utilizing a contractualist framework for understanding the basis and limits for the use of force by police, this article offers five limiting principles—respect for status as moral agents, proportionality, minimum force necessary, ends likely to be accomplished, and appropriate motivation—and then discusses uses of force that violate or risk violating those principles. These include, but are not limited to, unseemly invasions, strip searches, perp walks, handcuffing practices, post-chase apprehensions, contempt-of-cop arrests, overuse of intermediate force measures, coerced confessions, profiling, stop and frisk practices, and the administration of street justice.     

The Classification of Inkjet Inks Using AccuTOF™ DART™ (Direct Analysis in Real Time) Mass Spectrometry—A Preliminary Study

A novel approach for the analysis of inkjet inks is being reported. A time‐of‐flight mass spectrometer, coupled with a Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART?) ion source (AccuTOF? DART?), was used to determine if inkjet inks from various manufacturers and models of printers could be reliably differentiated, characterized, and identified. A total of 217 ink standards were analyzed. As inkjet printing often involves the use of multiple colors (e.g., cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to form an image or text, two different approaches to creating a library of standards and sampling methods were evaluated for implementation in a standard operating procedure. This research will show that a microscopic examination of the region of interest is requisite to identify what colors were utilized during the printing process, prior to comparing with known standards. Finally, blind testing was administered with 10 unknown samples to assess the validity and accuracy of the methodology.     

Illiberal democracy and violent conflict in contemporary Indonesia

When Indonesia's President Suharto was forced to resign in 1998, the accompanying uncertainty triggered serious communal violence in five regions. As the nation's politics and economy stabilized from 2002, so did those provinces. Identity-based conflict is now the rare exception rather than the rule in democratic Indonesia. Yet puzzlingly, despite the consolidation of democracy, ethnic clashes and mob violence against religious minorities continue to occur. While such events are now far smaller than those in the first years of democratization and occur only occasionally, their persistence requires analysis given the potential for escalation and what it tells us about Indonesia's reform process. In this article I compare recent incidents with that of the initial post-authoritarian era, and find that identity-based collective violence persists because many important causes of conflict have not been removed by democratic consolidation. As found by numerous scholars, many illiberal characteristics of the authoritarian state have segued neatly into democratic Indonesia. I assert that this has left several main causes of group violence firmly in place. I further contend that the failure to remove these phenomena partly has its origins in the order of democratic reforms chosen in the years after Suharto's resignation.     

Minister's Caucus Advisory Committees under the Harper government

In 2010 Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly created a system of Minister's Caucus Advisory Committees (MCACs), requiring ministers to consult with their backbench colleagues before taking policy proposals to cabinet. Based on interviews with Conservative MPs, ministers, political staffers and public servants, the paper argues that MCACs increase MPs' influence over government policy and enhance cohesion within the government's parliamentary caucus. By constraining ministers' policy freedom and providing the prime minister with regular political intelligence concerning policy proposals, MCACs reinforce his pre‐eminence within cabinet and represent a significant innovation in the relationship between the executive and government caucus.     

The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States

The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States . By David C. Atkinson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), pp.334. AU$31.50 (pb). Available in Australia through Footprint Books.     

How We Feel about the Deal

Recent experimental research suggests that humans are prone to systematic errors when determining how they currently feel, imagining how they will feel about future events, remembering how they have felt about past events, and understanding the preferences that underlie their decisions. In this article, we briefly review three basic assumptions that are called into question by recent findings regarding specific kinds of errors that people are prone to make. We suggest that this line of research has important implications for negotiation theory, research, advice, and practice.     

Trust but verify: Ministerial policy advisors and public servants in the Government of Canada

Political advisors in Canada are comparatively numerous and highly differentiated in role. Based on a recent survey, this article examines how senior ministerial policy advisors, a subset of the political staff community, perceive their support for ministers and their relationships with public servants. It finds that they increase ministers' policy capacity, encourage greater responsiveness from public servants, and generally feel that they enjoy good relations with officials and respect their role. Since much depends on advisors' personal maturity, however, the paper endorses the Trudeau government's release of a code of conduct for ministerial‐exempt staff as a means of embedding accountability more deeply within political staff culture.