PRESTIGE OF JOURNALS IN CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

The prestige of professional journals is an important element in the academic world because of the relationship of journal prestige to the careers of individuals and to the reputations of academic institutions. This study investigates the system of journal prestige in the field of criminology and criminal justice, using the ratings of professional journals obtained from a sample of respondents who are members of professional associations in criminology and criminal justice. The results show that there is a relatively high degree of agreement about the relative prestige of journals in the field, despite the fact that criminology and criminal justice is a multidisciplinary field involving professionals from a wide variety of occupational settings.     

DIFFERENTIAL RATES OF RURAL-URBAN DELINQUENCY: A Social Control Approach

Official statistics and numerous sociological studies indicate that rural areas generate lower rates of delinquency than do urban areas. This study attempts to explain these differential rates by drawing on the social control theory of Hirschi. Questionnaires were administered to a rural and an urban juvenile detention center population to investigate both extent of delin-quency involvement and degree of commitment to five institutional orders: family, church, school, peers, and formal authority. As hypothesized, the rural sample reported significantly less delinquent activity than the urban sample. Control theory also received support from the data. A strong inverse relationship was found between commitment and delinquency. When intro-duced as a control variable, commitment specified the original relationship between locality and delinquency. The specified relationships were strongest for rural youth with high commitment and for urban youth with low commitment.     

Periodical Prestige in Criminology and Criminal Justice

Journals in criminology and criminal justice have been ranked using subjective techniques to assess journal presitige as well as objective measures intended to assess journal eminence. Two recent studies have resulted in somewhat similar rankings of professional journals although each used distinct methods of data analysis and asked different research questions. This finding suggests that there is a consensus among professionals in the field concerning the importance of particular journals.     

THE FRENCH PRESIDENCY: CONCEPTUALIZING PRESIDENTIAL POWER IN THE FIFTH REPUBLIC

One of the main tasks of those who study French politics is to explain the source of presidential power in the Fifth Republic. In French, two rival explanations have emerged: the state power thesis and the majority power thesis. For the former, presidential power is structural, being derived from the organization of the state. For the latter, it is conjunctural, being dependent on the nature of the parliamentary majority. The aim of this article is twofold. It introduces an English-speaking audience to the two existing explanations of presidential power. It also proposes an alternative explanation drawn from the recent literature of new institutionalism. An institutional explanation combines the strengths of the two existing approaches and provides a future research agenda for the study of presidential power in France.     

DISARMING SOMALIA: THE CONTRASTING FORTUNES OF UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIAN PEACEKEEPERS DURING UNITED NATIONS INTERVENTION, 1992-1993

This article examines the impact of ‘micro disarmament’during the United States/United Nations humanitarian interventionin Somalia, 1992–93. To this end, it considers the controversialnature of the UNITAF mandate, the disarmament experiences ofAmerican and Australian peacekeepers in Mogadishu and Baidoaand the lessons yielded from a comparative analysis. The argumentthat emerges is that the absence of a consistent strategy linkingdisarmament and political reconciliation, not peace enforcementper se, largely condemned the UN operation to failure. If theUS had positioned itself, like the Australians in Baidoa, abovethe warlords instead of between them, the picture for UN interventionin Somalia may have looked quite different. The integrated Australianapproach revealed that the international community, confrontedwith other Somalias, may yet have a wider choice than impotenceor muscular peace-enforcement.     

A Letter from French Cameroun

This letter has been extracted, by permission of M. Grandidier,from the proceedings of the Académie des Sciences Colonialesfor the 20th December, 1946. It gives a remarkably lucid pictureof the problems common to all parts of Africa, seen throughthe eyes of Government, and it loses none of its interest fromthe fact that M. Delavignette has now succeeded M. Laurentieas Political Director at the Ministère de la France d'Outremer.