Lone Actor Terrorist Attack Planning and Preparation: A Data‐Driven Analysis,

This article provides an in‐depth assessment of lone actor terrorists’ attack planning and preparation. A codebook of 198 variables related to different aspects of pre‐attack behavior is applied to a sample of 55 lone actor terrorists. Data were drawn from open‐source materials and complemented where possible with primary sources. Most lone actors are not highly lethal or surreptitious attackers. They are generally poor at maintaining operational security, leak their motivations and capabilities in numerous ways, and generally do so months and even years before an attack. Moreover, the “loneness” thought to define this type of terrorism is generally absent; most lone actors uphold social ties that are crucial to their adoption and maintenance of the motivation and capability to commit terrorist violence. The results offer concrete input for those working to detect and prevent this form of terrorism and argue for a re‐evaluation of the “lone actor” concept.     

Applying Functional Analysis to the Case of a Malfunctioning Education System: Addressing System Complexity and Tangled Causes

A 4-year decline culminating in a collapse of school leaver exam results sent shockwaves through the Tanzanian state education system. Students and citizens attribute the collapse to visible deficiencies in classroom teaching, which is the product of a complex, government-administered system of teacher training colleges, schools, schools inspectorate, an examinations council, and a curriculum development institution. A model of the system is constructed and ‘interrogated’ to establish a research framework of key questions and propositions for functional analysis and evaluation of the system.     

Restoring Faith: Resolving the Roman Catholic Church’s Sexual Scandals Through Restorative Justice (Working Paper I)

Two years ago, Independent Academic Research Studies, a UK based international network, started a research and implementation project to explore the potential of restorative justice to help resolve sexual offending cases involving children and young people. One aspect of this project is the use of restorative justice with sexual offending cases that occurred within the Catholic Church. The purpose of this article is to report on the main findings of the first stage of the project, based on desk research into existing or past international projects dealing with the matter. The aim, however, is not to provide a literature review of the main arguments surrounding the topic, but rather a critical overview of the restorative programs and research projects that have been implemented to test the notion’s application in sexual offending cases. The results of these programs will be contrasted with notorious cases that have been processed through the traditional criminal justice system. Therefore, this article is the first in a series on how restorative justice could be applied to help resolve the sexual scandals in the Catholic Church.     

Labor strategies of families: An introduction

The collection presents an approach to history in which the dominance of structure is replaced by the effects of human agency. Individual motives and actions are the subject of these studies. In particular, the articles focus on the economic approach of family strategies, starting with a methodological discussion of the problematic concept of strategies: how to disentangle the influence of social structure, family circumstances, and individual behavior. The conflicting interests of individuals resulted in replacing the so-called “joint utility function” with that of “bargained family decisions.” The focus of the contributions is on the labor deployment of family members. All articles deal with three factors influencing labor deployment: adaptation to the structural environment, regulation of labor within the family, and reconciliation of choices at transition points during the individual life course of family members.     

Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women: Comparing Greece and The United Kingdom

While Western societies are striving to become more honest about gender inequality, terms such as ‘violence against women’ have started to appear in policy debates in Asia and worldwide. The response is largely punitive. The option of restorative justice has been considered, but evidence on actual practice with these cases is scarce. Following international attempts to block restorative justice for violence against women cases, this paper argues that a better understanding needs to be developed before further steps are taken in any direction. The authors examined cases from their respective countries, Greece and the UK, to identify common elements, differences and minimum standards when applying restorative justice in cases of violence against women. An abstract implementation mode for further research is constructed.     

Visual representation,editorial power,and the dual ‘othering’ of black men in the South African gay press: The case of Gay Pages

Abstract

This article considers some of the ways in which black gay men are marginalised within the queer community and have limited ‘visibility’ in mainstream queer visual culture. The formation of a minority within a minority (or the ‘other’ Other) is ultimately what the article sets out to expose. Thus, we argue that images of black gay men are far less ubiquitous than, for example, those of white, male and middle-class gay men. In order to illustrate this, a purposive sample from the South African gay men's lifestyle magazine Gay Pages is considered and critiqued. We argue that the visual mode of Gay Pages gives the impression of promoting a hegemonic gay male identity. This identity appears to be ‘natural’, but is in fact one-sided and stereotypical, as are most cultural constructions and representations. The narrow and limited representation of gay men endorses an exclusive, homogenous and inaccurate portrait of the queer constituency (in the minds of heterosexual and gay South Africans alike) and suggests the question that leads this investigation: If ‘belonging’ is articulated through the consumption of queer culture, what then of those queers who do not fit the ‘mould’ standardised by mainstream gay print media? This exploration of queer visual media deals not only with that which is frequently represented (white homomasculinity), but also, more significantly, with that which is not (black homomasculinity).     

Magnetic law: Designing environmental enforcement laws to encourage us to go further

The European Union has some of the world's most ambitious and highly developed environmental laws on its books, but their effectiveness is severely compromised by non-compliance. With the UNECE Aarhus Convention (1998), Europe launched an innovative legal experiment, democratizing environmental enforcement by conferring third party citizens and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) with legal rights of access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. Based on some 2000 surveys and over 150 interviews with stakeholders from three Member States – France, Ireland, and the Netherlands – we adopt a holistic, 360° perspective, capturing the views of regulated parties, NGOs, and the general public on this private governance experiment. Our data provide important new insights into the practical effectiveness of Europe's laws enabling private environmental enforcement, its (intended and unintended) effects on farmers' compliance decisions in the vital area of nature conservation, and how law might be used to stimulate pro-environmental predispositions.     

Assessing Asylum Claims in Africa: Missing or Meeting Standards?

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Networks, Management and Institutions: Public Administration as 'Normal Science'

How does network analysis fit into the development of public administration as an academic discipline? This article tries to bridge theoretical developments in public administration between the middle of the 1970s and the first half of the 1990s. The benchmarks being used are (1) the now classical account by Vincent Ostrom of The Intellectual Crisis in (American) Public Administration - published 25 years ago this year - and (2) Christopher Hood’s reconstruction of core values in (British) new public management. Rather than representing analytical developments as an endless succession of different or even mutually exclusive approaches, this contribution tries to reconcile different foci for analysing public administration. Administrative theory provides us with a rather stable meta-theoretical framework for studying the meaning of quality in government, governance and public administration at various levels of analysis. By relating the emergence of network analysis in PA to parallel developments such as the resurgence of (neo-)managerial and (neo-)institutional analysis, it also becomes clear that network analysis is useful as an analytical device, but that it needs to be linked to theoretical perspectives that provide us with operational assumptions about ‘networks’. Network analysis in itself only provides split ground for reinventing government and refounding public administration.