Addressing avoidable vision impairment in Mozambique and the Africa region

The Mozambique Eyecare Project was an international partnership to implement and research eye health education in Mozambique and the Africa region. An optometry degree was developed at Universidade Lúrio, Mozambique. In addition, existing eye health workers were upskilled with training. Researchers from various disciplines evaluated the project and its potential for impact on eye health in the region. The body of evidence generated from the research provides useful lessons for development programmes in general, as well as specific lessons for delivering eye health education and service delivery models for low-income settings.     

Parole release decisions: Impact of victim input on a representative sample of inmates

Positive and negative input, in both verbal and written forms, was studied for a representative sample of 820 parole-eligible adult inmates in New Jersey to determine the extent to which victim participation and the provisions of victim input policies affect contemporary parole release practices. Victim input was not found to be a significant predictor of parole release. Measures of institutional behavior, crime severity, and criminal history were significant. Verbal input had a greater affect than written input. In the short-term, parole administrators should develop guidelines to clarify procedures and create a more uniform and transparent application of victim input. In the long-term, the receipt of victim input should be used to identify victims who have not yet found closure so that appropriate support services can be provided prior to most inmates’ eventual releases from prison.     

China’s ‘New-Type’ Private Think Tanks: Is ‘New’ Better?

Journal of Chinese Political Science - China’s public policy research community has long been dominated by large state-run research institutes, but in recent years financially and...     

Russian Local Politics in the Putin–Medvedev Era

Political reforms and changes on the local level by the Putin–Medvedev leadership have resulted in an almost unprecedented turnover of leadership but they have aroused political conflict and even resistance by unsettling the political status quo throughout the 83 subnational units of the Russian Federation. The reforms have resulted in the marginalisation of the authority of city mayors, the recruitment from outside of chief executives of federation regions, and the polarisation of ethnic enclaves by national policies. Destabilising everything is the combination of a United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya) political party bent on national dominance, ambiguous liberal appeals and democratic reforms by President Medvedev, and a global economic recession.     

Vicarious Annihilation: The Effect of Mortality Salience on Perceptions of Hate Crimes

Previous research has found that reminding participants of their mortality creates a need for individuals to maintain and defend subjective cultural worldviews. As a result, mortality salient participants typically strive to uphold legal sanctions and also react negatively to individuals who espouse alternative worldview beliefs, exhibiting behaviors toward those targets ranging from verbal derogation to physical aggression. This paper extends this line of research by examining perceptions of hate crimes. Hate crimes represent a unique class of crime where both the perpetrator and victim may be viewed as worldview violators. Study 1 revealed that mortality salient participants were more supportive of hate crime legislation than were control participants when hate crimes were described in abstract terms and no specific victim was mentioned. In Study 2, a specific victim who posed a potential worldview threat was identified. In this case, mortality salient participants were less punitive toward offenders who attacked these specific worldview-threatening victims.     

Soy states: resource politics,violent environments and soybean territorialization in Paraguay

Soy production has radically transformed the social, ecological, territorial and political form of Paraguay. This paper traces waves of sojización – soy territorialization – to analyze how soybean resource politics are changing environmental governance and state–society relations in Paraguay. I argue that political, social and ecological ruptures mark each territorialization: agrarian reforms that reconfigured land control, the introduction of genetically modified soy varieties, and most recently a ‘parliamentary coup’ preceded by spectacular acts of violence against campesinos. The violent rejection of post-neoliberal politics espoused by former President Fernando Lugo marked the beginning of a third wave of sojización defined by the increasing influence of the soy industry, campesino and indigenous dispossession, and violent environments. Paraguay reveals unexpected consequences and contradictions of the Left Turn in Latin America. The country’s experiment with post-neoliberal politics created conditions that eventually broadened and deepened neoliberalizations of nature. The term ‘soy states’ indicates three conjunctures of soy production and how they reconfigure state–society relations and conceptions of ‘the state’ in Paraguay vis-à-vis soy production. My arguments draw from extensive qualitative field research and applied work in Paraguay coupled with secondary source analysis, contributing to debates about neoliberalizations of nature, plant territoriality, agrarian political ecology and state formation.