‘War don don’: stability,normalcy and Sierra Leone

There are few consistently reliable indicators of stability in post-conflict countries, but police behaviour is one of them. Based on the premise that stability has less to do with the introduction of specific institutions and procedures, and more to do with how people assess their environment and go about their routine business, this article uses police reform in Sierra Leone, 1996–2005, to provide a contextual explanation of the meaning of stability and the normalcy underpinning it. Rather than focusing on programme implementation, or on the normative indicators associated with international stabilisation and reconstruction projects, it argues that stability is the cumulative result of political realities and visible low-level activities which individually reinforce or offset each other.     

Responding to Catastrophic Terrorism

Current approaches to conventional terrorism are too restrictive for the environment of catastrophe and must be supplemented by insights from disaster management and escalation theory. Although disaster management alone cannot address weaknesses in strategic planning, when complemented by the concept of escalation, the two become a useful aid to understanding events directly related to extremes of scale, complexity, or longevity. Responding to catastrophic terrorism will thus require security interests to be balanced by strategic focus, policy coherence, operational skills, and cultural values.     

Life-style constraints on formal political participation—Why so few women local councillors in Britain?

Much of the literature on both formal political participation and political recruitment is static in concept. It fails to take into account that opportunities for participation may alter during one individual's lifetime. In particular, the lives of women change, often abruptly, on marriage and at childbirth. Time constraints increase and decrease as family demands heighten or lessen. The small survey of women political activists reported here suggests that flexibility of time constraints, taken together with family attitudes, are important factors in women's recruitment. Some women's expectations of local government and perceptions of its power also militate against their recruitment. Although the survey is small and limited to Labour Party activists, its findings are likely to be applicable to women in other industrialized countries.