Hegemony,Force Posture,and the Provision of Public Goods: The Once and Future Role of Outside Powers in Securing Persian Gulf Oil

International relations theories emphasize the stabilizing role hegemons play in world politics. But little scholarship has examined the link connecting hegemony to its potentially positive returns in the security realm: force posture. We correct this deficit by developing and testing an argument about the consequences of different hegemonic force postures under varying threat conditions. We present a typology of force posture options and probe their effects through over-time analysis of how major powers have worked to provide one particularly important public good since 1945: access to Persian Gulf oil. Drawing on field work, we also explore the implications of our framework for current and future US force posture in the region. We conclude that hegemonic stability is a very real phenomenon in the Gulf, but it does not require the massive forward deployment of US forces that has characterized the past twenty years of US presence there.     

Characteristics of Bone Injuries Resulting from Knife Wounds Incised with Different Forces

The aim of this research was to experimentally determine the characteristics of incised bone wounds, which are commonly found in defense injuries. A specially constructed pivoting arm device was used to inflict wounds with controlled forces and direction. Five knives were selected to inflict the wounds on porcine forelimbs. Eight incised wounds were made per knife per force. A larger knife and a greater force caused longer and wider bone wounds. Comparisons of individual knives at the two forces produced varying results in the bone wounds. A correlation was seen between the force and the length (r = 0.69), width (r = 0.63), and depth (r = 0.57) of bone wounds. Serrated‐edge and nonserrated knives can be distinguished from the appearance of the wound. The outcomes may be applicable in forensic investigations to ascertain the forces associated with incised wounds and identify the specific knife used.     

Don’t let them kill you on some dirty roadway: survival,entitled violence,and the culture of modern American policing

The police subculture serves as a means for police officers to cope with the perceived stresses associated with police work, including the belief that their lives are constantly threatened by dangerous ‘others’. As a result, the police subculture is peppered with racialized survivability discourse that reminds police of the possibility of their own mortality, mobilizes them through fear, and facilitates an entitlement to violence in the name of guardianship. Drawing from the author’s past experiences as a police officer, this paper offers insight into how, through this racialized police survivability discourse, police officers come to believe that their lives are more valuable than others, particularly when compared to Black lives. This has not only been demonstrated by the disproportionate killing of unarmed Black men but also by the emergence of the Blue Lives Matter ‘movement’ that arose in direct oppositional response to the subculture’s perceived threat of the Black Lives Matter movement.     

Large-scale land deals in Sierra Leone at the intersection of gender and lineage

There is wide engagement with large-scale land deals in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from the perspectives of development and international political economy. Recently, scholars have increasingly pointed to a gendered lacuna in this literature. Engagement with gender tends to focus on potential differential impacts for men and women, and it also flags the need for more detailed empirical research of specific land deals. This paper draws from ethnographic data collected in Northern Sierra Leone to support the claim that the impacts of land deals are highly gendered, but it also argues that lineage in a land-owning family and patronage intersect with these gendered impacts. This data supports my claim that analysis of land deals should start from an understanding of the context-dependent, complex arrays of power and marginality. Such a starting point allows for a wider and ‘messier’ range of impacts and experiences to emerge.     

‘The objectionable injectable’: recovering the lost history of the WLM through the Campaign Against Depo-Provera

ABSTRACT

The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) was one of the most important social movements of the twentieth century. Although the last few years have seen an increase in historical work exploring the movement, archival-based accounts of the diverse groups that comprised the WLM are few and far between. This article will uncover, and shed light on, the important work of the Campaign Against Depo-Provera. It will explore how women’s campaigns operated during this period, whilst also providing a lens for examining how women engaged with race and class. It will argue that we need to adopt a more nuanced understanding of how feminists engaged with identity, as an examination of the Campaign Against Depo-Provera questions many of the previously held orthodoxies in the literature.     

Convenience stores and routine activities in a summer tourist destination

In this paper we examine the effects of alcohol outlets, with particular attention to convenience stores, located in an East Coast Tourist City. Tourist City offered an opportunity to observe the interplay between convenience stores and robberies and assaults in the presence of large volumes of summer tourists. Guided by Routine Activities Theory, we focused on the convergence of potential victims, guardianship and offenders in the vicinity of convenience stores. The first part of our paper concerns the effects of convenience stores on assaults and robberies in block groups. Using grocery stores as a comparison to convenience stores, we found that the number of convenience stores was correlated with significantly higher levels of both robberies and assaults. The second part of our investigation employed small circular buffer areas focusing on the immediate area around the convenience stores. This analysis revealed that these small areas were associated with significantly higher assaults in the summer and offseason but robberies only during the offseason. In addition, we found that variation in the number of other alcohol outlets near the convenience stores increases the number of assaults within the buffer areas.