The Wrong Prescription for the Congo

In October 2006, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which experienced possibly the world's deadliest humanitarian catastrophe, held the second of two rounds of the first free presidential elections in 46 years. The culmination of a transitional process funded, designed, and overseen by the West, the elections were supposed to bring stability, accountability, and democracy to a land long devastated by war, poor administration, and authoritarianism. Sadly, this brighter future is unlikely to be reached any time soon, for the transitional process is fatally flawed. A bold approach is needed to reform the DRC's governmental apparatus, the collapse of which not only affects its citizens, but also destabilizes states throughout the continent and provides a haven for terrorists, arms traffickers, and criminal networks.     

Corporate criminology: Explaining deviance of business and political organizations

Explanations of criminal behavior historically have focused on the behavior of individuals. The criminality of organizations, or corporate criminology, has only recently received systematic attention from researchers and policy makers. Four existing theories of organizational crime, and subsequent evaluations of their explanatory power, are comparatively assessed with special attention given to their implications for control strategies. It is suggested that strategies based on causal factors will achieve greater success than prevailing approaches to corporate criminality.     

LGBTQ-Affirming Policing: Tactics Generated by Law Enforcement Personnel

Law enforcement personnel (LEP) use a variety of tactics to perform their job duties. Although LEP often receive specialized training to work with ethnocultural minorities and are sometimes trained to work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) citizens, a clear articulation of LGBTQ-affirming police tactics has not yet been established. Using qualitative content analysis and a multiple case study approach, this project identified a variety of tactics generated by LEP in written surveys and group discussion of scenarios involving LGBTQ citizens. Results showed that across all scenarios, LEP were able to generate LGBTQ-affirming tactics, including both typical police procedures, as well as approaches specific to LGBTQ citizens. Non LGBTQ-affirming tactics typically reflected reluctance to adapt general procedures to meet the needs of LGBTQ citizens. The results of this study support the use of group-based scenario training to help LEP identify and adopt LGBTQ-affirming approaches. This study is significant because it represents a first step toward identifying best practices for LGBTQ-affirming police tactics.     

Highway Robbery: Testing the Impact of Interstate Highways on Robbery

Research has shown that the occurrence of crime is based on multiple factors including a variety of geographical characteristics. Previous researchers have suggested that the environmental feature of the interstate system has an influence on crime. For this study, we test for a relationship between interstate presence and robbery at the county-level in Georgia. Additionally, we test whether or not urban/rural differences affect this relationship. Findings are consistent with previous research showing that the number of interstate exits in a county significantly increases crime; in this case the robbery rate.     

Nothing Is True,Everything Is Permitted: Premodern Religious Terrorism

Abstract

In the beginning faith was the alpha and omega of revolutionary dreams and terrorist actions. This article will examine case studies among the Peoples of the Book—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—for religious terrorism is not the product of one faith. It argues that the cultural resonance of each movement examined offers a blank slate on which contemporary seekers, dreamers, and fighters may write. The title, borrowed from a popular novel, is the leitmotif of this form of violence. By all objective forms of analysis, the movements chronicled in these pages are a parade of seemingly stupid ideas held by idealists, fools, and fanatics who dreamed that, with God at their side, they could bring perfection to a fallen world. In such a cause, antinomian violence is inevitable and genocide its logical outcome. Yet these early movements are not to be despised, for together it was they, not the huddled masses cowering before the powers that be, that created the modern world.     

Policy Spaces: Applying Lefebvrian Politics in Neo-institutional Spaces

The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of conceptualising policy institutions as neo-institutional spaces. The goal of this paper is to promote a more collaborative policy-making process that recognises the importance of cultivating and articulating shared spatial interests between policy actors. To facilitate a more collaborative process, the paper applies the principles of Lefebvre's triad to understand the internal and external policy geographies that inform government decision-making and promote the stability or instability of policy sub-systems. The utility of the proposed approach is examined within the context of two proposed scenarios. The paper concludes that a new policy geography might be effectively used to promote the overall political viability of policy sub-systems.