The United States and Maritime Strategy: A Parochial View from the U.S. Naval War College

The emergence of transnational non-state threats, America's ongoing war on terror, and the increasing globalization of the world's economy all affect the security and stability of the maritime environment. As the world's leading economic and maritime power, the US bears a unique responsibility—it must secure and share the benefits of the global commons. A maritime strategy is not just a force planning exercise, or a guide to naval operations in wartime. This article identifies key trends and non-military issues – geographic, economic, and diplomatic – that the Navy and the country must consider in developing a new maritime strategy to provide for good order at sea in the coming decades.     

WHAT SHOULD FAMILY LAWYERS KNOW? RESULTS OF A SURVEY OF PRACTITIONERS AND STUDENTS1

The contemporary practice of family law demands that lawyers know far more than the law. Results of a recent survey of professionals and law students suggest that today's family lawyer needs knowledge and skills that are often missing from law school curricula. Survey respondents emphasized the importance of strong interpersonal skills like listening, negotiation, and working with clients in emotional crisis, as well as keen understanding of financial issues in family law, the impact of separation and divorce on children, and the ethical dimensions of family law practice. Law students held contrasting views to law faculty and to practicing attorneys on a number of measures, ranking adversarial courtroom skills as more important and placing less emphasis on skills, knowledge, and attributes related to ethics.     

Is Putin’s popularity real?

Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters? We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is within 10 percentage points of that implied by direct questioning. We find little evidence that these estimates are positively biased due to the presence of floor effects. In contrast, our analysis of placebo experiments suggests that there may be a small negative bias due to artificial deflation. We conclude that Putin’s approval ratings largely reflect the attitudes of Russian citizens.     

The Mixed Temporalities of Transnationalism in Dreams of Speaking

This article explores the mixed temporalities inherent in Gail Jones’s treatment of transnational grief in Dreams of Speaking (2006). I examine the novel’s interests in modernity and temporality and show how the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, in the novel, creates grief that is shared across national boundaries. The novel explores the coexistence of the modern and the unmodern, and Jones exemplifies this in the spectral nature of grief; it haunts the two protagonists throughout Dreams of Speaking. This article reads the coexistence of modernity and the unmodern alongside the ways in which Japan unsettles Eurocentric notions of colonial modernity (with its insistence on shared temporalities of progress) by having been a colonial power as well as by undertaking substantial modernisation in the postwar period. I employ Harry Harootunian’s notion of “mixed temporalities” to show the transnational dimensions in the cross-cultural interaction this novel facilitates. I compare the novel’s treatment of the bomb, and of temporality, to Salvador Dalí’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) and highlight the transnational sentiments in Jones’s treatments of the tropes of water and resonance.     

TQM and labor-management cooperation-- a noble experiment for the public sector

Recent initiatives by the Clinton Administration to promote labor-management cooperation and to reinvent government suggest reconsidering the efficacy of total quality management (TQM) and labor-management cooperation initiatives in the public sector. Key elements of both initiatives, for example, process improvement/innovation, focus on the customer, and employee empowerment, are inherent parts of the National Performance Review (NPR) and, as such, are critical to the achievement of NPR outcomes. Achieving these outcomes involves the simultaneous transformation of agencies and unions. This is no small task. The challenges and risks involved in such a large-scale transformation are identified, as well as the factors that make the public sector an appropriate (and safe) place for the American labor movement to experiment with new ways to manage relationships.