Twilight of impunity for Africa's presidential criminals

This article tracks the fate of six former African tyrants all accused of crimes against humanity: Charles Taylor; Mengistu Haile Mariam; Hissène Habré; Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko and Jean‐Bédel Bokassa. It examines the politics that have determined their fate and finds that, despite changes in international law and opinion since the Cold War, impunity still prevails. Western governments are still willing to trump justice with politics; and African presidents still offer solidarity to club members. For recent tyrants, life is only a little more difficult than it was for older ones. Yet their future may be tougher as the globalisation of justice begins to bite. None will be comfortable with the powers granted the International Criminal Court; nor with western disregard of state sovereignty as it targets heads of government still in office who are deemed guilty of international crime. Even the new African Union has abandoned the doctrine of non‐interference.     

Insuring morality

This article describes and compares two forms of moral regulation employed in connection with insurance institutions. The first governs through moralized personal attributes or pressures like 'temptation' and 'character'. The second governs through moralized institutional or system attributes and processes described in terms of 'efficiency'. The article traces these forms of moral regulation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, arguing that both continue to inform popular and specialized discourses of risk.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

The link between dyslexic traits, executive functioning, impulsivity and social self-esteem among an offender and non-offender sample

PURPOSE: The current study had two core aims; first to explore the link between dyslexic traits and other aspects of functioning among a sample of offenders and non-offenders (students); and, second, to explore if dyslexic traits were over-represented among offenders. A subsidiary aim was to explore if the results were influenced by an offender's current index offence (i.e. violent versus non-violent). METHOD: Ninety-two adult male participants took part: sixty offenders and thirty-two non-offenders. All completed a structured interview assessing dyslexic traits, namely the Dyslexia Adult Screening Test battery (DAST: Fawcett and Nicholson, 1998). Participants also completed a measure of executive functioning (Benton Word Fluency Test, Benton, A. (1968) Differential behavioural effects in frontal lobe disease. Neuropsychologica, 6, 53-60), impulsivity (Barratt Impulsiveness Scale: BIS-II, Barratt, E.S. (1994), Impulsiveness and Aggression. In J. Monahan and H.J. Steadman (Eds.), Violence and Mental Disorder: Developments in Risk Assessment (pp.61-79). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) and social self-esteem (Texas Social Behavior Inventory: TSBI, Helmreich and Stapp, 1974). RESULTS: Offenders presented with more dyslexic traits than non-offenders, with those with violent index offences presenting with more traits than those with non-violent index offences. Offenders performed poorly on assessments of executive functioning when compared with non-offenders. Dyslexic traits were predicted most significantly by executive functioning difficulties followed by decreased social self-esteem. There was a trend for increased impulsivity to correlate with increased dyslexic traits. Dyslexic traits were also predictive of membership to the offender group whereas impulsivity, executive functioning or social self-esteem was not. CONCLUSION: Preliminary evidence is provided for increased dyslexic traits among offenders compared to non-offenders. The study highlights the correlates of dyslexic traits. The implications of these findings for future research are outlined.     

Goffman on the Jury: Real Jurors’ Attention to the “Offstage” of Trials

Social psychologist Erving Goffman, in his classic work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, provides a framework that explains why jurors may turn their attention at the courthouse to information not formally presented from the witness stand. We dub this “offstage observation,” a type of juror behavior that has not been systematically examined empirically. Analyzing a unique data source of 50 actual jury deliberations in civil trials, we find that jurors do look to the offstage in evaluating the claims of the parties. However, in contrast to predictions, these observations played a surprisingly minor role in the jury deliberation process.     

Shared Race/Ethnicity,Court Procedural Justice,and Self‐Regulating Beliefs: A Study of Female Offenders

Using survey data from a sample of white, black, and Hispanic incarcerated females (N = 554), we examine if the theoretically hypothesized and empirically demonstrated relationship between procedural justice and obligation to obey the law is substantiated among a sample of offenders and explore the impact that sharing the race/ethnicity of the defense attorney and prosecutor in their most recent conviction has on female inmates' perceptions of court procedural justice and their perceived obligation to obey the law. The findings reveal that female offenders who perceive the courts as more procedurally just report a significantly greater obligation to obey the law. In addition, white female inmates who had a white prosecutor were significantly more likely to perceive the courts as procedurally just. Non‐whites, though, perceive the courts as more fair if they encountered a minority prosecutor regardless of whether the prosecutor was black or Hispanic.