Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009

How can people and organisations best respond to emergency events that are significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated, expected, prepared for – or even imagined? What forms of organisations are likely to be best able to cope with such events – and what procedures and practices will aid in their ability to do so? Obviously, extreme events – events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of our ordinary experience and expectations – by definition will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely to any given emergency organisation). Nonetheless, when they do occur they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States (US) in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010 – these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.     

DDR and transitional justice: bridging the divide?

This article explores the complex relationship between disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants (DDR) and transitional justice. While both DDR and transitional justice often operate simultaneously, neither process has traditionally been designed with the other in mind. In fact, they are often in tension or competition, pursuing competing demands and potentially drawing on the same scarce donor pools. While scholars and practitioners of transitional justice have become somewhat attuned to the presence of DDR processes in countries emerging from conflict, and the challenges and opportunities they present for transitional justice, we observe that by comparison, it is only fairly recently that DDR policies, if not programmes, have begun to take account of the demands and practice of transitional justice. We argue that while the activities of DDR and transitional justice may often be in tension, in some instances they might be designed to operate in a more complementary fashion. However, for this to even be conceivable, it is essential that scholars and practitioners of each seek to understand the work of the other better.     

Testing types: A review and test of police types

This paper offers a review and comparison of five major typologies of individual police officers, concluding with the suggestion that the five typologies contain a total of four major distinct types. An independent data set is then used in a secondary analysis to test empirically the existence of the four generic types. The test results provide nothing to support the notion that the four types actually exist; no empirical counterpart was found for any of the hypothesized generic types.