Challenges for Effective Counterterrorism Communication: Practitioner Insights and Policy Implications for Preventing Radicalization,Disrupting Attack Planning,and Mitigating Terrorist Attacks

Growing concerns about small-scale, low sophistication terrorist attacks, and the difficulties they present for security services, make public coproduction of security increasingly necessary. Communication to ensure that the public(s) is aware of the role they can play will be central to this. This article, based on interviews with thirty expert practitioners, explores challenges associated with communication designed to prevent radicalization, interdict attack planning and mitigate the impacts of a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom and Denmark. The interplay between these challenges and the contemporary terrorist context are analyzed, highlighting that new, or adapted, communications and approaches may be necessary.     

Legitimacy and Coercion in Peacebuilding: A Balancing Act

ABSTRACT

Despite the tendency of the power literature to analyse legitimacy and coercion in isolation, both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that coercion and legitimacy are not parallel lines but can interact in different ways, supporting or undermining each other. A methodical exploration of the relationship between legitimacy and coercion is important not only for improving the theoretical literatures on power and legitimacy but also in the light of the increasing interest in the power of legitimacy in statebuilding and peacebuilding. This article first analyses the overall interaction between coercion and legitimacy, and then explores the question that emerges from the interaction analysis; what level of coercion is permitted or required in order for a mission’s local legitimacy to be sustained? Finally, for the practice of peacebuilding, the article shows that an operation needs to understand its initial legitimacy standing with the local population, as this determines how much coercive force it can employ without undermining its overall legitimacy.     

The Dynamics of Enlargement in International Organizations

Most international organizations (IOs) expand their membership over the course of their lifespan. Although these enlargements tend to be heralded as normatively positive — for the IOs themselves, for the new members, and for cooperative outcomes more generally — expansions can also lead to conflicts in the organization. What conditions lead to enlargement rounds that reshape an organization in unexpected ways? We argue that, depending upon the diversity of the initial group of countries, members may vote to admit new entrants that can tilt organizational decision-making in unexpected directions. We anticipate fewer enlargements with lesser impact on the character of the organization among organizations that have either a smaller range of founding members or a relatively even initial dispersion. We develop an agent-based model that accounts for the complex decision-making environment and social dynamics that typify IO accession processes. The model helps us explain how the nature of decision-making in organizations can shift following enlargement, likely changing the organization’s output and goals.     

Why does it happen? Explanations for men’s violence against women by women with interpersonal victimization histories

Men’s violence against women (MVAW) has been identified as a critical sociocultural problem. Gaining a better understanding of perspectives on the etiology of violence held by women with histories of male-perpetrated interpersonal violence provides insight into the processes of victimization and recovery. Furthermore, emerging research suggests that feminist beliefs may facilitate recovery and impact how survivors of MVAW perceive it. In this study, we aimed to explore, in women with histories of interpersonal violence, (1) the ways they explained the high prevalence of MVAW and (2) associations between the strength of their feminist beliefs and the participants’ explanations. Female college students (N = 32, ages 18–22) participated in qualitative interviews in which they were first presented with published statistics about the frequency of MVAW, then asked to provide explanations for the high prevalence of this phenomenon. Individual responses clustered into one or more of four factors: (1) societal influences, (2) blaming women, (3) familial influences, and (4) characteristics of men and women. The extent to which participants identified with feminist beliefs was associated with how they perceived their own victimization. Women who endorsed strong feminist beliefs more frequently cited societal influences on MVAW, whereas women who endorsed feminist beliefs less strongly were more likely to blame women for it and offered stereotypical views of women as passive and fragile.     

From extractivism towards buen vivir: mining policy as an indicator of a new development paradigm prioritising the environment

This article analyses mining policy as an indicator of a larger question: are some Third World governments starting to steer away from plunder ‘extractivism’ towards a paradigm that prioritises the environment? We begin with the cases of El Salvador and Costa Rica, which have major mining bans in place. We then present the results of our research in which we find five other countries with noteworthy mining-policy shifts: Panama, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and New Zealand. A sixth country, Honduras under President Zelaya, stands as a recent historical case of how sensitive such a policy change can be. A key take-away from our article is that critical development scholars and practitioners need to look more closely at the mining sector – not simply to analyse case studies of specific mining protests and resistances to extractivism, although these are of course important. Rather, there is a need to investigate policy changes that just might be indications that the era of unquestioning extractivism has ended and that at least some governments are initiating policies to incorporate environmental externalities, policies that suggest a changing development paradigm in the direction of environmental – and concomitant social and economic – ‘well-being’ as envisioned in buen vivir.     

Challenge,Conformity and Casework in Interwar England: the first women councillors in Devon

Edith Splatt and Juanita Phillips, both former suffragettes, were the first women councillors on, respectively, Exeter City Council and Devon County Council. This article explores how these two very different women approached their task, the issues they tackled, both on welfare generally and specifically on some topics high on women's post-suffrage agendas. It considers the local support on which they drew and contrasts the different reception they were accorded, their representation of their constituents' interests, and their progress on committees and in the full council. The article contributes to an understanding of the diversity of women's contributions to public service after the achievement of women's suffrage.     

Gendered experiences of dispossession: oil palm expansion in a Dayak Hibun community in West Kalimantan

This article explores the gendered experience of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). It shows how the expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihood of indigenous women in this already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the ‘family head’ system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women's rights to land, and women are becoming a class of plantation labour. At the same time, as in other cases of expansion of agrarian corporate commodity production, we can discern a familiar pattern of ambivalence between, on the one hand, the attractions of regular cash income and, on the other, the loss of resource tenure and autonomy, which helps to explain the community's gendered experience of coercion, exploitation, intimidation, consent and resistance.     

The Gendered and Racialised Division in the Korean Labour Market: The Case of Migrant Workers in the Catering Sector

Based on the empirical analysis of migrant women employed in the catering sector, this paper examines the gendered and racialised division in the Korean labour market. Given limited labour protection and the flexibilisation of the migrant workforce in the labour market, South Korea has been able to reduce possible economic and social costs and, at the same time, enjoy the benefits of the significant economic contribution of migrant workers. By looking at gender relations and racial discrimination in the catering sector, and inconsistent government policies, this paper underlines that migrant women are marginalised in the labour market owing to their ‘multiple vulnerability’ as women, migrants and undocumented workers.

The Impact of Online versus Offline Campaign Information on Citizens’ Knowledge,Attitudes and Political Behaviour: Comparing the German Federal Elections of 2005 and 2009

Against the background of the debate about how the internet changes democratic processes, this article assesses the impact of online versus offline campaign information on citizens’ knowledge, attitudes and political behaviour using data from two pre-/post-election surveys conducted at the German federal elections in 2005 and 2009. Our results show that sophisticated and less sophisticated citizens alike gain knowledge when using online information. Moreover, we find that people exposed to online information develop less ambivalent attitudes towards candidates and parties but do not take on more extreme issue positions. Online information is ineffective in stimulating turnout but compared to traditional news media, the internet gives smaller parties the chance to gain votes. We conclude that overall online information can enhance election campaigns. However, the amount of change should not be overstated as the effects are similar to those of offline political information and depend on the campaign context.