The UN Commission of Inquiry on Lebanon: A Legal Appraisal

In the wake of the Second Lebanon conflict, the UN Human RightsCouncil established an independent body of experts to investigatealleged violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) perpetratedby Israeli forces. The Commission's report suffers from oneserious and conspicuous flaw — the Commission was notcharged with simultaneously considering Hezbollah's violationsof the same body of law. In some instances, this one-sided focuswas not only politically unbalanced, but substantively inadequatesince a full understanding of Hezbollah's command structure,strategic objectives and military operations was essential indetermining whether targets destroyed by Israel were legitimatemilitary objectives and whether consequences for civilians weredisproportionate to the military advantage gained. Be that asit may, the Commission's final report testified to the excessive,indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by Israeliforces and an overall lack of respect for the cardinal principlesregulating the conduct of armed conflict. The Commission's findingsare particularly disquieting, given the independent nature ofthe investigation and, ultimately, the compatibility of muchof the Commission's legal reasoning with orthodox interpretationsof IHL. The legal issues raised by the Inquiry are thereforeof ongoing importance, most notably for the Israeli-appointedWinograd Committee.     

Socio‐legal Studies in France: Beyond the Law Faculty

This article is the third in an occasional series dealing with the development, current status, and future of socio‐legal studies in selected countries. It follows articles by Kim Economides (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Harry Arthurs and Annie Bunting (Canada). In this article we argue that in France one can identify work that corresponds to the key strands of socio‐legal research in Anglo‐American societies but that ‘socio‐legal’ as a category of research and scholarship does not have the presence it has in the United Kingdom. French law faculties continue to be strongly shaped by a traditional disciplinary orthodoxy rooted in a highly and distinctively structured form of doctrinal analysis. In the first part, we explain the relatively limited presence of socio‐legal studies in French law faculties in terms of the historical and institutional mechanisms by which disciplinary closure has been created and maintained around traditional orthodoxies. But in the second part we will trace the presence – predominantly outside law faculties – of significant fragments of socio‐legal practice in the scholarship of law and allied disciplines.     

Does Conflict Lead to Ethnic Particularism? Electoral Violence and Ethnicity in Kenya 2005–2008

What impact does violence have on ethnic identity? Do acts of violence tend to create greater segmentation and “hardening” of identities among ethnic groups? In this article, we empirically assess the claim that violence inevitably leads to the hardening of ethnic identity (which we operationalize as expressions of ethnic particularism over a national identity). Using survey data from Kenya covering the period 2005–2008, integrated with geocoded data on conflict events in Kenya during that period, and employing multilevel logistic regression analysis, we do not find support for the contention that ethnic identity hardens inevitably as the result of violence. Rather, our findings suggest support for a more nuanced view of the effects of violence on ethnic identity.     

Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses

Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it incorporates information about the document, such as the author's gender, political affiliation, and treatment assignment (if an experimental study). This article focuses on how the STM is helpful for survey researchers and experimentalists. The STM makes analyzing open‐ended responses easier, more revealing, and capable of being used to estimate treatment effects. We illustrate these innovations with analysis of text from surveys and experiments.     

The hung authorities ‐1993 onwards

Overview and scrutiny committees were intended to provide a counterbalance to executive decision-making. This paper presents an 'audit' of local government scrutiny based upon research conducted over the last five years. Three key findings emerge from the review of evidence to date: the research findings are remarkably consistent over time and between authors; all research concludes that, in general, overview and scrutiny is still struggling; although a mixed picture emerges when examining progress on individual roles for scrutiny. Indeed, research indicates that scrutiny is - in some authorities - making a valuable contribution in terms of policy review but is still failing to hold the executive to account effectively. The relationship between scrutiny and performance management remains underdeveloped, whilst external scrutiny constitutes a marginal activity for most authorities. The paper concludes that such findings reflect the importance of local political and organisational factors which dictate the boundaries and shape of overview and scrutiny: representing a triumph of local context over government-prescribed structural and constitutional change.     

Role Conflict in Community Corrections

A study was conducted to determine whether prior research had accurately conceptualised community correctional officers' experience of role conflict on the basis of officers' role preferences. It was hypothesised that officers who were welfare workers or punitive officers would experience inter-role conflict while those who attempted to combine the welfare and punitive roles (protective agents) would experience intra-role conflict and role ambiguity. Furthermore, an exploration of how inter-role conflict, intra-role conflict, role ambiguity, and officers' role preferences were related to occupational burnout was conducted. It was found in this study that officers' preferences for the role of welfare worker, protective agent, or punitive officer were not related to the level of inter-role conflict, intra-role conflict, or role ambiguity experienced by officers. Officers' role preferences were not related to burnout. Inter-role conflict and intra-role conflict were associated with emotional exhaustion. These findings call into question the whole tradition in the community corrections literature of inferring role conflict from officers' role preferences and necessitate that the whole issue of whether officers experience role conflict be revisited by employing direct measures of role conflict.     

Peer Group Delinquency and Sexual Victimization: Does Popularity Matter?

Though a large body of research has found that peer social network characteristics influence both offending and victimization, relatively little is known about the influence of social network characteristics on adolescent sexual victimization. Attractiveness and sociability largely indicate popularity for teenage females, which in turn leads to earlier onset of dating, greater dating options, and potential risk of sexual victimization—an observation not tested in the criminological and criminal justice literature. We suggest and evaluate 2 competing hypotheses: that popularity within a network insulates females from sexual victimization and that popularity may increase exposure to delinquent others and facilitate sexual victimization. Results suggest that popularity does not have a consistent effect but instead that its role is conditioned by the deviance of the network. Popularity is associated with an increase in the likelihood of victimization when peer deviance is high but with a decrease when peer deviance is low. We further demonstrate that an interaction between a female's own drinking and the proportion of her friends that are male strongly affects her likelihood of sexual victimization. Implications for policy and future research are explored.