From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a Photography of Peace

International Relations (IR) literature on the visual construction of the international does not systematically engage with the visualisation of peace. In this article, I make photographic discourses available to IR scholars interested in the visual construction of the international and invite IR scholars to substantialise these discourses based on their specialist knowledge on war, violence, conflict and peace. I engage with aftermath photography by challenging its almost exclusive focus on war and the legacy of violence. Furthermore, I engage with Fred Ritchin's notion of peace photography and Cynthia Weber's attempts at visualising peace. Problematising claims to universality, generalisability and causality, I emphasise that the relation between images and peace is episodic, not causal; that visions of peace, reflecting specific cultural configurations, cannot claim universal validity; and that peace photography has to move beyond aftermath photography's focus on the legacies of the past. Finally, I briefly look at the work of Joel Meyerowitz and Rineke Dijkstra, the one displaying aftermath as a beginning sustaining power, the other photographically accompanying a person's adaptation to a new, more peaceful environment.     

Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755

Public Choice - Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French...     

Police Perceptions of Irrational Unstable Behaviours and Use of Force

Police identification of people experiencing mental illness is usually based on either the person having an official contact history with police or through observing behavioural indicators commonly associated with mental illness during an encounter. Police have voiced concerns with their ability to identify and respond to people experiencing mental illness in a timely way and report that they commonly resort to more coercive tactical options to resolve encounters. The present study employed a mixed method design to examine 286 police use of force incidents to investigate the association between force used on and by offenders displaying irrational-unstable behavioural characteristics. The irrational-unstable offenders were two times more likely to be perceived by police to have an apparent mental disorder and almost four times more likely to have a known mental health history; one in six had an official record of contact with mental health services. There were few differences in police and offender use of force, considering force as both a categorical and a continuous variable, while incident-level comparisons suggested that police force was generally proportional to offender resistance. Implications are discussed in terms of the need to redress limitations with the traditional police approach style.