Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing: Token Gestures or Informed Policymaking?

Since the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 (2000), which is referenced in most of the mandates for peacekeeping authorizations and renewals as of its adoption, UN peacekeeping forces have begun a process of gender balancing. While we have seen an increase in the numbers of female peacekeepers during the decade 2000–2010 and variation in the distribution patterns of female military personnel, we do not know if female military peacekeepers are deploying to areas that are safest or to areas with the greatest need for gender-balanced international involvement. Because the decision-making authority in the allocation of peacekeeping forces rests with the troop-contributing countries, which might not have bought into the gender balancing and mainstreaming initiatives mandated by the UN Security Council, we propose and find evidence that female military personnel tend to deploy to areas where there is least risk. They tend not to deploy where they may be most needed—where sexual violence and gender equity has been a major problem—and we find only a modest effect of having specific language in the mandates related to gender issues.     

The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade

The climax of the battle of Kohima was in June 1944, 70 years ago. This article is about the part played in that victory by Ursula Graham Bower, an English woman subsequently honoured by the RSAA. She led a team of Naga tribesmen from North East India who acted as intelligence scouts, feeding the 14th Army with information about the Japanese, acting as guides for British units and providing a security network against spies. Graham Bower was effective because she had lived amongst the Nagas before the war and gained their trust. Inevitably she was glamourised in the media and hailed as the Jungle Queen or the Naga Queen, a Western beauty fighting against the Japanese. In reality, with the Nagas, she performed a intelligence role, not a fighting role, but it was a vital contribution to victory.     

Too Many People and Too Few Livestock in West Africa? An Evaluation of Sandford's Thesis

We examine whether Stephen Sandford's (2006 Sandford, S. 2006b. “Too many people, too few livestock: the crisis affecting pastoralists in the Greater Horn of Africa”. Accessed at: http://www.future-agricultures.org/pdf%20files/Sandford_thesis.pdf [Google Scholar]b) ‘too many people, too few livestock’ thesis for the Greater Horn of Africa applies to West Africa. In a comparative study of seven pastoral systems across West Africa we found that pastoralists have generally successfully adapted to pressures on grazing resources. We describe three adaptive strategies: 1) integration and intensification in the Sudanian zone; 2) movement to the Sub-Humid zone; and 3) extensification in the Sahelian zone. We end by proposing four interrelated factors that account for the differences in pastoral systems between West Africa and the Greater Horn of Africa.     

Testing a rational choice model of “desistance:” Decomposing changing expectations and changing utilities

We argue that a rational choice framework can be used to explain declines in offending from adolescence to young adulthood in two ways. First, subjective expectations of offending can be age graded such that perceptions of rewards decrease and perceptions of risks and costs increase. Second, the marginal (dis)utility of crime may be age graded (e.g., preferences for risks, costs, and rewards). We examine changes in offending from adolescence to young adulthood among a subset of individuals from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 585) and employ a nonlinear decomposition model to partition differences in offending attributable to changing subjective expectations (X) and changing marginal utilities (β). The results indicate that both have direct and independent effects on changes in offending over time. The results of a detailed decomposition on the subjective expectations also indicate that differences exist across the type of incentives. That is, the effect of changing expectations is attributed mainly to changes in perceived rewards (both social and intrinsic). Changing expectations of social costs and risk of arrest from offending have weak effects on changes in criminal behavior, which suggests that they must be accompanied by increases in the weight placed on these expectations to promote appreciable declines in offending.     

Revisiting Delinquent Attitudes: Measurement,Dimensionality and Behavioral Effects

Objective

This study examines whether single-item attitude measures commonly used in research adequately capture adolescent attitudes towards specific delinquent behaviors. It also explores whether delinquent attitudes form a unidimensional or multidimensional construct. Finally, this study tests Ajzen and Fishbein’s principle of compatibility to determine if delinquent attitudes have a behavior-specific and a situation-specific effect on behavior.

Methods

Data from a sample of 223 high school students in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) and from the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) evaluation are used. The means and correlations between single-item global attitude items are compared to situation-specific measures. Exploratory factor analysis is conducted to examine dimensionality, and logit regressions are used to predict the willingness to offend in the PNW and self-reported offending in the GREAT.

Results

The findings indicate that: (1) global attitude measures underestimate the degree of approval of delinquency and are not strongly correlated with situation-specific attitudes; (2) delinquent attitudes form a multidimensional construct that coalesce around crime-types; (3) there is some evidence that attitudes towards specific crimes have crime-specific effects on behavior, and; (4) situation-specific attitudes predict the willingness to offend in a specific situation above and beyond one’s overall approval of that behavior.

Conclusions

Attitudes towards fighting and theft are too complex to be captured by single-item measures. The findings also support the principle of compatibility which suggests that attitudes may be well-suited to explain why individual engage in specific types of crimes in specific situations. Other implications and limitations are discussed.

     

Perceptions of Campus Safety Policies: Contrasting the Views of Students with Faculty and Staff

A series of recommendations to colleges and universities concerning safety, security, and incident response policies emerged in the aftermath of several high-profile tragic events on campuses. Although these appear as “common sense” solutions to the perceived risks, little is known about the level of support the normative recommendations receive from the very people they are intended to protect. This study utilizes survey data from a Midwestern university to examine the level of support expressed by students, faculty, and staff for commonly recommended campus safety policies and procedures. Multivariate models are used to compare the viability of explaining levels of support through the lenses of respondent demographics and experiences, fear of crime, and perceptions of campus public safety. Although attitudes significantly differed, students were substantively quite similar to faculty and staff. However, the factors that were hypothesized to influence support for campus safety initiatives (i.e., prior victimization, fear of crime, protective measures, perception of disorder, race, sex, and age) were not consistently predictive. This suggests that campus policymakers and state legislatures may be well served to consider the opinions of campus community members before imposing what may be unpopular policies that have questionable efficacy.     

Citizen Voice and Public Entrepreneurship: The Organizational Dynamic of a Complex Metropolitan County

Recent empirical research points toward a reassessment of theeffects of complex patterns of local government in metropolitanareas. As research increasingly discloses positive relationshipsbetween (1) indicators of jurisdictional fragmentation and complexityand (2) indicators of efficiency in service provision and production,it becomes more important to explain, in a functional sense,how a complex metropolitan order is able to produce relativelygood results. This article first considers two broad approachesto understanding metropolitan complexity—exit and voice—andargues that citizen voice must be the principal mechanism ofcomplex metropolitan governance A case study of St. Louis County,Missouri, is then used to explore the various processes by whichcitizen voice may contribute to the organization and governanceof a metropolitan county. Citizen voice is linked to publicentrepreneurship and, thereby, to various efficiency-inducingproperties that emerge within a complex metropolitan order.