From clients to citizens: Asset-based Community Development as a strategy for community-driven development

In this paper, Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) is presented as an alternative to needs-based approaches to development. Following an overview of the principles and practice of ABCD, four major elements of ABCD are examined in light of the current literature on relevant research and practice. This involves exploring the theory and practice of appreciative inquiry; the concept of social capital as an asset for community development; the theory of community economic development; and lessons learned from the links between participatory development, citizenship, and civil society. The paper outlines how ABCD both reflects and integrates trends in these areas, and stands to benefit from the insights generated from this work.     

Former Yugoslav space: The ‘eastern question’ and European security

This article begins by tracking the footprints left by politicians, statesmen, and diplomats who set out to solve the ‘Eastern Question’ created by the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian Empires in southeastern Europe. The analysis focuses on the consequences within former Yugoslav space of outcomes created by competing agendas of these international power brokers and political/military leaders of state‐building nations fighting to gain or expand territorial homelands in the name of historic justice or self‐determination. It concludes by evaluating security policy and options in Kosovo as of January 1999.     

Transnational Organized Crime: A European Perspective

One of the most controversial issues the United States has to deal with since the beginning of the 2003 war in Iraq is the Mujahedeen a-Khalk (MEK). For more than two decades the organization had been the major armed opposition to the Iranian government and, at the same time, had been a close ally to Saddam Hussein's regime. This study examines the history of the MEK, the debate within the Bush administration on what to do with the MEK fighters, and the solutions proposed by the Iraqi Governing Council, the Iranian government, and the United States. The analysis suggests that operationally and ideologically the MEK has reached a dead end.‐     

Affect-ing discourse: towards an embodied discourse analytics

The contemporary retheorisation of affect is impacting on an increasingly wide range of disciplines/inter-disciplines in the human sciences. Of particular relevance for this paper are, on the one hand, the emphasis on embodiment and, on the other, the ideas of “flow”, “intensity” and “contagion”. Together, these challenge traditional views of affect as equivalent to emotion, emanating from the self and ending at the boundary of the self. Discourse studies has not yet been significantly influenced by the “affective turn” now taking place within social and cultural theory. It has largely maintained, albeit implicitly, the traditional view of affect. Yet, if all human interaction is inflected with affect, in the sense indicated above, a different model of discourse seems called for. This paper aims to make a contribution to the development of a new “affect-ed” discourse analytics by identifying a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena that could contribute to such a project. We draw primarily on the work of linguistics, bringing to notice a range of phenomena that may be unfamiliar either because of their technicality or because of the problematic status of linguistics in much cultural theory. The paper proceeds via a brief genealogical account of current affect theory to note a range of language phenomena that have been or can be read in terms of individual feeling and suggests an analysis of several forms of interaction re-read in terms of affective contagion. This section of the paper constitutes a preliminary inventory of components of an affect-ed discourse analytics.     

Social relationships between prisoners in a maximum security prison: Violence, faith, and the declining nature of trust

Purpose

This paper describes significant changes to social relationships in a high security prison, including the prominent role played by faith identities and fears of radicalisation in shaping prisoner social life.

Methods

The study consists of a repeated sociological investigation of the nature of staff-prisoner relationships at a single site in the UK. Methods included extensive observation, the creation of a regular dialogue group with 14 prisoners, long, private interviews with 32 staff and 52 prisoners, focus groups, and surveys with 170 prisoners and 180 staff.

Results

The study found a decline in already low levels of trust, with dramatic effects on the prison's inner life. Relationships between prisoners were fractured, more deeply hidden than in the original study, and the traditional prison hierarchy, formerly easily visible in long-term prisons, had dissolved. Longer sentences, fears of radicalisation, confusion about prison officer power, and high rates of conversion to Islam, reshaped the dynamics of prison life, raising levels of fear. Clear indications of the anxieties and social unravellings of late modern society were found.

Conclusions

Increased punitiveness, indeterminate sentences, the intensification of risk-oriented practices, and anxieties relating to terrorism, have deepened the tone and reshaped the practices of long-term imprisonment.