From Missionary to Ministerial Adviser: Constance Duncan and Australia‐Japan Relations 1922‐1947

The contribution of A. Constance Duncan (1896‐1970) to Australia‐Japan relations has been overlooked in mainstream historiography. This article examines her role in the development of these relations from 1922 to 1947. She was one of the few women to be accepted into the elite inner‐circle of intellectuals influencing Australian foreign policy during this period. In 1922 she embarked on a career in Japan as a missionary, or “foreign secretary”, for the Young Women's Christian Association. She returned to Australia in 1933 and took up a position with the Bureau of Social and International Affairs. Her familiarity with Japanese culture and society, together with an abiding interest in promoting world peace, led naturally to her participation in the world of international relations at a time of heightened interest in the Asia‐Pacific region and Japan in particular. She was part of an intellectual movement that considered an educated Australian public to be of paramount importance in future Australia‐Japan relations and international relations generally. This article traces her activities and examines her influence in the educational field and on Australian foreign policy‐making.     

The Roles of Mothers’ Neighborhood Perceptions and Specific Monitoring Strategies in Youths’ Problem Behavior

The neighborhood context can interfere with parents’ abilities to effectively monitor their children, but may be related to specific monitoring strategies in different ways. The present study examines the importance of mothers’ perceptions of neighborhood disorganization for the specific monitoring strategies they use and how each of these strategies are related to youths’ alcohol use and delinquency. The sample consists of 415 mother–child dyads recruited from urban and suburban communities in Western New York state. Youths were between 10 and 16 years of age (56% female), and were mostly Non-Hispanic White and African American (45.3 and 36.5%, respectively). Structural equation modeling shows that mothers who perceive greater neighborhood problems use more rule-setting strategies, but report lower levels of knowledge of their children’s whereabouts. Knowledge of whereabouts is related to less youth alcohol use and delinquency through its association with lowered peer substance use, whereas rule-setting is unrelated to these outcomes. Thus, mothers who perceive greater problems in their neighborhoods use less effective monitoring strategies. Prevention programs could address parental monitoring needs based upon neighborhood differences, tailoring programs for different neighborhoods. Further, parents could be apprised of the limitations of rule-setting, particularly in the absence of monitoring their child’s whereabouts.     

Suicide Squads: The Logic of Linked Suicide Bombings

What strategic logics underlie terrorist groups’ use of linked suicide attacks? Are the goals that groups seek to achieve when sending linked bombing teams somehow inherently different than when sending individual suicide bombers? To answer these questions, this article introduces three typologies of linked suicide bomber detonation profiles—simultaneous, sequential, and nonproximate—and theorizes why terrorist groups might view each type of linked suicide bombing to be preferable to deploying a single suicide bomber. Improvements resulting from using an individual attacker include: ensuring a higher likelihood of successfully hitting a given target (simultaneous detonations); causing more casualties than a single bombing (sequential-wave detonations); and engendering wider-spread shock and awe (nonproximate detonations). Drawing on an original dataset detailing the entirety of Boko Haram’s suicide bombing efforts from 2011 to 2017, we then examine the extent to which these linked bombing typologies do actually appear to successfully lead to an improvement over the deployment of single suicide bombers. While we find that sequential-wave and nonproximate suicide bombings demonstrate evidence of hypothesized improvements over the deployment of single suicide bombers, our data show that deploying simultaneous suicide attackers does not lead to higher efficacy at targeting when compared to the deployment of individual bombers. In attempting to account for this fact, we argue that Boko Haram’s simultaneous detonation teams likely fail to show an improvement over single-bomber attacks because they tend to be composed of what we call “unenthusiastic and under-trained” bombers: teams of often uncommitted women, and sometimes children, which it deploys in tandem in a bid to avoid individual defection and increase the likelihood of at least one detonation in an attack. We conclude by suggesting what the process of linked bombing reveals about both terrorist groups in general and Boko Haram specifically.