Book Reviews

There is curently a division between conflict analysis and studies of terrorism, despite the fact that similar actors are involved in the "new wars" and "new terrorism," and that there are also similarities in terms of root causes. Both conflict and terrorism studies are increasingly crossing disciplines in their attempts to present coherent frameworks and bodies of theory, however. As the divisions between war, peace, conflict and terrorism, between friend and enemy, soldier, criminal, and civilian break down, there is now potential for a critical reading of the insights this presents. The terrain on which violence has been traditionally deployed has now shifted to a more symbolic terrain requiring a reassessment of the assumptions terrorism and conflict studies rest on.     

Terrorism and the marxist left: Peru's struggle against Sendero Luminoso

Abstract

The political balance in Peru since the return of democratic government in 1980 has shifted to the left, and the United Left (Izquierda Unida or IU) is considered a serious contender in the 1990 elections. This paper investigates IU's prospects for success in presenting a clear alternative within the country's Marxist coalition and in undermining support for the armed revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso. The origins of IU are traced from the 1978 constituent assembly elections, and its organization, structure, and tactics are evaluated in terms of its effectiveness. If it achieves power, it will face its greatest challenge from Sendero Luminoso, the militant Maoist group that has been responsible for much of the terrorism that has gripped Peru in this decade. The authors describe Sendero's strategy and tactics and those of its chief rival, the MRTA. Finally the paper explores IU's alternatives for dealing with these radical leftist groups and the political violence they espouse.     

“Our Backs Are Against the Wall”: The Black Liberation Army and Domestic Terrorism in 1970s America

This article addresses the gap in the literature on U.S. domestic terrorism and counterterrorism in the 1970s by examining a once-notorious but now largely forgotten terrorist group, the Black Liberation Army (BLA). An outgrowth of the Black Panther Party, the BLA was directly responsible for at least 20 fatalities, making it amongst the most lethal “homegrown” U.S. groups of the period. This article seeks to shed new light on the BLA by exploring its relatively short but violent trajectory. By focusing on the group's origins, operations, ideology, and structure, the BLA can be understood as part of a wider landscape of homegrown political violence. The BLA emerged during the waning phase of a protest cycle that included the civil rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements. Like other terrorist groups before and after, the BLA claimed to be acting in self-defense and on behalf of the people, presenting itself as an army resisting police occupation of minority communities. With the collapse of the extreme Left in the mid-1970s, the BLA's prospects for creating a broader revolutionary base became remote. The article also examines law-enforcement responses to the BLA and the competing ways in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police (and in particular, the New York Police Department) framed and countered the BLA threat.     

European‐Atlantic Security Institutions: Current state and future prospects

Since the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits have been musing over the decline of the West. The disappointing US military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, together with the subprime mortgage crisis, seem to be evidence of an abrupt end to America's ‘unipolar’ moment. In Europe, the sovereign debt crisis has amplified Europe's long-term structural economic problems and laid bare the fragile institutional foundation on which the Economic and Monetary Union was built. At the same time, the BRICs and other emerging economies have been growing at unprecedented rates. Those same analysts see a ‘decoupling’ in the world economy: the developing economies pulling the world out of recession, while the advanced industrial economies are unable to solve their domestic difficulties. So to them, the events of the past five years signify the beginning of the end of Western influence, eventually leading to a more complete rebalancing of the world economy's current ‘Western’ system of governance. This article argues instead that the West still has a significant edge when it comes to most critical factors that determine long-term economic growth potential, including technology, innovative capacity, research and development, investment climate and education. Furthermore, the transatlantic economy is less vulnerable than the rest of the world to outside economic shocks and might eventually prove more capable of reform than many expect. The current malaise in the transatlantic community might therefore prove once again to be more cyclical than structural. Relying on linear projections, many are ‘crying wolf’ again, too loud and too soon.     

The Cost of Terrorism: The Relationship Between International Terrorism and Democratic Governance

After Al Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, many democracies reacted to the event, and to international terrorism in general, by passing laws restricting civil liberties and political rights, raising questions about the balance between security and liberty. Such laws have produced alarms among civil libertarians, worldwide. Are the alarms justified? In this article we analyze the relationship between the yearly number of international terrorist attacks in 24 countries from 1968–2003 and (a) measures of civil liberties and political rights as provided by Freedom House, and (b) levels of democracy as measured in the Polity IV scales. We take the number of international terrorist events, by country, from data provided by the Memorial Institute of the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) http://www.tkb.org/Home.jsp. Our analysis indicates that there is, generally, no relationship between the number of international terrorist events and the levels of civil rights, political rights, or democracy as measured by the Freedom House and Polity IV indicators. When there is a statistically significant relationship, it is negative, opposite to what is predicted by the tradeoff hypothesis.     

The Anglo–French Victory on the Somme

The British historiography of the 1916 battle of the Somme fails to engage with the alliance dimension of the campaign. This article considers the battle in the strategic framework of the Allied General Offensive agreed on in 1915, and puts it in the context of French and British strategic, operational and tactical progress on the western front in the First World War. In particular it brings out the significant French role in the planning and conduct of the battle. It concludes that the battle was a victory because it turned the course of the war in the western allies favour.     

Collective Bargaining and Job Benefits in Florida Municipal Police Agencies, 2000–2009

While a recent analysis of unionization among Florida county sheriff deputies was informative, that study failed to provide a comprehensive picture of all law enforcement unionization activity in that state. More specifically, county sheriff offices account for only 20 % of all local law enforcement agencies in the state, represent approximately half the sworn personnel in Florida, and have only been engaged in collective bargaining for the past ten years. As a result, the present study incorporates municipal police agencies, a hitherto neglected portion of the Florida law enforcement community, in an effort to gain a fuller understanding of how unionization influences salaries and other job conditions. The results underscore the importance of adopting a broader orientation to understand the progression of collective bargaining objectives.     

Comparing the effects of explicit and implicit false-evidence ploys on Mock Jurors' verdicts,sentencing recommendations,and perceptions of police interrogation

In police interrogation, an explicit false claim to have evidence raises important legal and constitutional questions. Therefore, some interrogation manuals recommend implicit false-evidence ploys (FEP) that ask suspects about potential evidence without making a direct claim to possess the evidence. Similar to the hypotheses in a recent study of implicit FEP and confession rates, we hypothesized that individuals would perceive implicit FEP as less coercive and deceptive when compared to explicit FEP that involve direct claims of false evidence. Although mock jurors rated all FEP as highly deceptive and coercive and as more deceptive than controls, we found that participants did not view implicit and explicit FEP differently and that ploy specificity (implicit or explicit) failed to affect verdicts or recommended sentences. These findings suggest that although interrogation trainers and scholars in law and psychology discriminate between the methods, jurors do not.     

The measurement and influence of child sexual abuse supportive beliefs

Abstract

The identification of offence-related cognition is a major target of most cognitive–behavioural treatment programmes for sexual offenders, and a number of measures are available for this purpose. This study assessed the psychometric properties of a brief measure of beliefs that support and justify child sexual abuse: the Sex With Children (SWCH) scale. Factor analysis revealed two distinct types of belief: that sex with children is harmless, and that children actively provoke adults into having sex with them. The SWCH was also found to have good internal consistency, test–retest reliability and concurrent validity. Child molesters scored significantly more highly on the SWCH than did rapists or non-offenders, and high-risk child molesters reported more entrenched offence-supportive beliefs than lower risk child molesters. A relationship was also observed between general offence-supportive beliefs as measured by SWCH and offence-specific cognitions ascribing responsibility or enjoyment to the offender's victim. The SWCH subscales appeared to closely match two of the implicit theories hypothesized by Ward and Keenan (1999 Ward, T. and Keenan, T. 1999. Child molesters’ implicit theories. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 14: 821–838. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to be related to child molestation. Sex offender treatment providers need to be aware of the relationship between underlying implicit theories and offence-specific distorted cognitions about the victim's experience.     

Gender dynamics in the sentencing of white-collar offenders

Theory and empirical research often have agreed that female and white-collar offenders benefit from leniency at the sentencing stage of criminal justice system processing. An untested research question emerging from these distinct bodies of literature is whether the greatest leniency is afforded to female white-collar offenders. We investigate the individual and interactive influences of gender and white-collar conviction on judicial leniency by analyzing Florida sentencing guidelines data from 1994 to 2004 using multinomial logistic regression to model the decision to incarcerate nonviolent economic offenders in jail or prison rather than sentence them to community control. Results indicate that female street offenders sentenced by male judges receive the most lenient sentences, while male offenders are punished the harshest regardless of the gender of the sentencing judge or type of crime. Theoretical and policy implications of the findings are discussed in terms of focal concerns, familial paternalism, and attributional perspectives on judicial decision-making.