Islamist militancy in Sierra Leone

This article examines the contemporary Islamic trends in post-conflict Sierra Leone (through 2009) against the background of international concerns that the country might become a haven for religiously-inspired violence. It argues that there is some evidence that prolonged economic impoverishment and foreign religious influences, especially from Saudi Arabia and Iran, have led to a reinvigoration of Islam in post-war Sierra Leone. Though this reinvigoration has resulted in the visibility of more purist strains of the religion, there are no indications that the Sierra Leonean Muslim groups are actively participating in any worldwide jihadist network or will engage in large-scale religiously-inspired extremism and violence. The recent history of the country indicates that attempts to mobilise religious sympathies for political ends in Sierra Leone have been short-lived and largely unsuccessful     

The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge

This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority and representational form, and explore these by comparing and contrasting selected works of recent literary fiction that touch on development issues with academic and policy-related representations of the development process, thereby demonstrating the value of taking literary perspectives on development seriously. We find that not only are certain works of fiction ‘better’ than academic or policy research in representing central issues relating to development but they also frequently reach a wider audience and are therefore more influential. Moreover, the line between fact and fiction is a very fine one, and there can be significant advantages to fictional writing over non-fiction. The article also provides an Appendix of relevant works of fiction that we hope academics and practitioners will find both useful and enjoyable.     

Book reviews

Poverty, Progress and Exclusion: an Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century. By Rosemary Thorp. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press for the Inter‐American Development Bank and the European Union, 1998. Pp.xiv + 369. £20.50. ISBN 1 886938 35 0

Economic Dynamism in the Asia‐Pacific: The Growth of Integration and Competitiveness. Edited by Graham Thompson. London: Routledge, 1998. Pp.402. £50 and £14.99. ISBN 0 415 17273 X and 17274 8

India and Pakistan: The First Fifty Years. Edited by Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg, and Dennis Kux. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.xii + 217. £32.50 and £10.95. ISBN 0 521 64185 3 and 64585 9

Agencies in Foreign Aid: Comparing China, Sweden and the United States in Tanzania. Edited by Goran Hyden and Rwekaza Mukandala. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp.ix + 246. $69.95. ISBN 0 312 22098 7

Market Integration, Regionalism and the Global Economy. Edited by Richard E. Baldwin, Daniel Cohen, Andre Sapir and Anthony Venables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xix + 344. £45 and £16.95. ISBN 0 521 64589 1 and 0 521 64181 0

Instruments of Change: Motivating and Financing Sustainable Development. By Theodore Panayotou. Earthscan in association with the United Nations Environment Programme, 1998. Pp.240. £19.95. ISBN 1 85383 467 X

Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses and Prevention. By Joachim von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu and Patrick Webb. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp.xvii + 218. £32.50. ISBN 0 8018 6121 7

The East Asian Welfare Model: Welfare Orientalism and the State. Edited by Roger Goodman, Gordon White and Huck‐ju Kwon. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp.206. £17.99. ISBN 0 415 17211 X

Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. Edited by Ronaldo Munck and Denis O'Hearn. London and New York: Zed Books, 1999. Pp.xx + 217. £39.95 and £22.50. ISBN 1 85649 637 6 and 638 4

Streetlife China: Transforming Culture, Rights and Markets. By Michael Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.xvi + 304. £13.95 (US$19.95) and £37.50 (US$54.95). ISBN 0 521 63719 8 and 63141 6     

When Managerialism Meets Internationalism: Administrative Reform in the United Nations in the 1970s

This article examines whether reform ideas that gained influence in national-level bureaucracies in the 1970s were also on the United Nations’ internal agenda. The Joint Inspection Unit (Bertrand) Report of 1971 is the focus of this analysis, as it addressed personnel problems in the UN Secretariat and identified structural shortcomings. Our analysis shows that New Public Management ideas were in circulation in the UN at this time. It also demonstrates the different pressures that international bureaucracies face in regard to their personnel. This is likely to make their responses to reform pressures, such as those experienced in the 1970s, unique.     

Policy making/implementing activities of elected county executives and appointed county administrators: Does form of government make a difference?

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the policy making/implementing behavior of elected county executives and appointed county administrators. While both sets of actors are engaged considerably in the policy making and implementing processes, the manner in which they undertake these activities varies, suggesting that form of government and method of (s)election do make a difference in how counties are governed.     

Ethics in leadership: The case of local politicians

The mainstream literature on leadership has little to say about the role of ethics. Equally, much of this literature is concerned with the private sector and with managerial leadership. This paper addresses both these gaps, by reporting on the development of a scale for measuring ethical values in local political leadership, the public service values scale. This is one section of a larger instrument for assessing the skills of local political leaders: the Warwick Political Leadership Questionnaire. The paper reports on the use of this instrument in a 360 degree format, following piloting of a self assessment version. The responses of 19 elected members and 241 feedback givers are analysed. These data offer support for the validity and reliability of the public service values scale. The paper concludes with a research agenda, offering suggestions for how this scale can be applied to researching ethics in leadership.     

Governance and Conflict

Within a global gendered economy based on an international division of labor, Filipina migrants have become nannies, maids, and caregivers in affluent homes in numerous Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Filipina migrants who seek employment as domestic workers abroad have been described as “classical” transmigrants who keep in touch with family members back home and commute between their countries of origin and their destinations. In this article — based on ethnographic research in Israel, Palestine, and the Philippines between 2003 and 2008—the author argues that Filipina migrants are transnational in a much broader sense than commonly discussed in studies on migration: engaged in border-cross-ing journeys through a number of nation states, many Filipina migrants move on and on rather than back and forth. They do so within a global hierarchy of desirable destination countries, ranked according to the differences between nation-states with regard to salaries and the legal entitlements migrants can claim, the costs and risks migrants have to take in order to enter, and these countries’ overall subjective and imaginative attractiveness. By migrating on, Filipina domestic workers acquire an intimate picture of the Middle East “backstage.” Some even become self-pro-claimed Middle Eastern experts or politically active Christian Zionists or sentimental Orientalists, who, in spite of their Christianity, miss fasting on Yom Kippur or during Ramadan as they continue their journeys toward Western Europe and North America, where they have hopes of living and perhaps gaining citizenship.     

Recent developments

The tertiary sector is operating in an increasingly market-driven environment. Teaching standards are under intense scrutiny as universities strive to meet the expectations of students exercising consumer choices. Continuing professional development programmes have a pivotal role in supporting and shaping best practice in modern law schools. Early career academics in both the New Zealand and British university systems share similar teaching and learning objectives.

However, the respective professional development programmes have different compliance regimes. The United Kingdom has adopted a scheme of formal training and teaching accreditation, supported by the UK Professional Standards Framework. In New Zealand mandatory training requirements are more limited. It is submitted that New Zealand universities should similarly require probationary academics to undertake a formal programme which promotes an understanding of the scholarship of teaching. It is further argued that programmes in both jurisdictions should emphasise subject-specific pedagogical knowledge to expose law teachers to the distinct academic and vocational aspects of their discipline.     

Grunwick and trade union recognition

This article considers the approach of law schools to the assessment of students' use of English. The QAA subject benchmark statement for law requires students to demonstrate the ability to use English proficiently but over recent years there has been anecdotal evidence that some students who lack this ability have obtained law degrees. To obtain further information on how law schools try to ensure compliance with the relevant benchmark, a short questionnaire was sent to a randomly selected sample of 20 English law schools. This article presents the results of that research, considers some of its possible implications and concludes that the assessment methods that many law schools are currently employing do not ensure compliance with the relevant benchmark.