Youth violence in South Africa: the case for a restorative justice response

Crime presents a fundamental challenge in South Africa. Particularly disturbing is the prevalence of violence committed by and against young people. The main purpose of this article is to look at how South Africa should deal with the issue of youth violence. It argues that while structural violence constitutes a significant contextual cause of the phenomenon, a more proximate and specific cause lies in young people’s exposure to direct violence in their schools, homes and communities. In many cases, therefore, simply sending young people to prison – where they may experience even greater levels of violence – is not the answer. This article thus examines the potential merits of restorative justice as a response to the problem of youth violence, focusing particularly on the 2009 Child Justice Act. This research is based on fieldwork in South Africa and draws upon both the author’s qualitative interview data and a range of surveys with young people conducted by the Center for Justice and Crime Prevention in Cape Town.     

The state human trafficking and human rights issues in Africa

Internal factors in Africa which include limited autonomy of African states, the states’ various degrees of lack of capacity, as well as inept and parasitic leadership make human trafficking and human rights abuses in Africa inevitable. Regardless of the connections suggested to exist between globalization and human trafficking, internal factors in Africa are more fundamental than globalization in explaining human trafficking and the associated human rights violations. Corruption and misrule brought about wars and crises, unemployment, poverty, and diseases, all of which acted as push factors in disposing victims to be trafficked. Internal factors were exacerbated by the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and were only deepened by the impacts of globalization. Any meaningful resolve to combat human trafficking and fight human rights abuses in Africa necessarily has to address the nature of state and the character of the leadership in the region.     

Economic Growth and Convergence in Latin America

Little is known about the convergence process among developing countries in general and in Latin America in particular. For the period as a whole there is no evidence of a narrowing in the cross-country dispersion of income (sigma convergence). But there is evidence of convergence to different steady state income levels at a speed that is common to all countries (conditional beta convergence). The article also shows that the estimates of convergence are sensitive to the way in which GDP per capita is measured.     

Wage Differentials in Brazil: Theory and Evidence

The investigation of wage determination and wage differentials in developing countries has concentrated on the effects of human capital and different sources of segmentation associated with institutional arrangements and structural characteristics on earnings. In this article, we use micro-data for Brazil for the 1980s and 1990s to test several competitive theories, and models with segmentation explained by efficiency wages. We find that unmeasured abilities and efficiency wage models seem to play a role in wage determination, while compensating differentials and transitory difference theories were found to be irrelevant to wages formation.     

Imperial governance,sovereignty and the management of chronic instability in Africa

An important political consequence of the crisis of capital in the 1970s has been an increasing intensification of informal imperialism within Africa. This paper argues that the advanced capitalist countries again confronted the endemic problem of overcapacity alongside a decline in the rate of profit and that the major neoliberal reforms foisted upon the African continent were part of the spatio-temporal fix that followed. The quotidian management of many African states was not an intended consequence of structural adjustment, but the subsequent perturbations that beset many developing countries after following such policies has led to such a degree of institutional instability that a new form of imperial governance has come into being. Juridical sovereignty has been maintained, but political sovereignty has been severely compromised through the emergence of this neo-imperial governance. Today an array of external actors is embedded in the sinews of these states, setting the general parameters of state policy to such an extent that one can no longer speak of these countries as possessing de facto independence. The rise of these so-called ‘governance states’ and the new emphasis on ‘governance with government’ constitute a new non-territorial, political form of imperialism.     

The Implications of the Lyons Report into Local Government in England for Structural Reform in Australian Local Government

The Lyons Inquiry into English local government presented its Final Report in 2007. It has significant implications for local government jurisdictions beyond England. This article considers the import of the Lyons Inquiry for reform to Australian local government. It is argued that the Lyons Inquiry adds weight to other work that questions the traditional reliance on amalgamation as the chief instrument of Australian local government reform. In particular, the “place-shaping” thesis developed in the Lyons Inquiry shows that the Australian emphasis on structural reform has been misdirected. Further, the Lyons Report offers a range of policy options besides municipal amalgamation.     

美国黑幕揭发运动与进步主义改革

20世纪初期,美国在工业化和城市化发展过程中产生了诸多社会问题。为了解决这些问题,在其国内兴起了以改革为目的的进步主义运动,黑幕揭发作为一场社会批判运动为进步主义改革提供了强大的舆论支持。黑幕揭发运动的主要发动者和参加者是一批新闻记者,他们通过实地调查,大胆揭露了美国社会的各种丑恶现象,使进步主义改革的观念深入人心,推动了一系列改革法令的颁布及实施,对美国社会产生了深远和持续性的影响。     

Making Markets and Eastern Enlargement: Diverging Convergence?

This study deals with the extent and content of 'Europeanisation' in the Central and East European (CEE) countries at the level of market making. It argues that Europeanisation at the level of market making was about creating states with strong capacities to preserve and regulate markets and with increased and reconstructed administrative and planning capabilities. The most successful CEE countries with their strong states and weak social and economic actors converged towards a moving target, that is, towards EU countries in the process of supranational market making with dramatically different constellation of powers among key economic actors. The paper discusses the specifics of national level market making in the CEE countries, the factors of divergence within the region, and the 'diverging convergence' between the CEE and the EU countries.     

If at first you don't succeed

Political and social stability in advanced capitalist societies is threatened both by the impossibility of achieving full employment owing to automation and the transformation of family life and gender relationships. This article explores explanations of these shifts in Jeremy Rifkin's and Ray Pahl's work. It explores alternative models of employment in which formal work is shared and third-sector work is expanded, underwritten by a cultural shift in which work, success and consumption are traded for free time, balance and self-development.     

Structural Models of Voter Behavior in the 2000 Polish Presidential Election

Abstract

The data of the 2000 Polish presidential election have been analyzed according to Newman and Sheth's model of voter's choice behavior (1985). Although this model was originally interpreted within the statistical perspective of discriminant analysis, it could be also extended within the framework of structural equation methodology. Namely, if the seven cognitive domains (Issues and Policies, Emotional Feelings, Candidate Image, Current Events, Epistemic Issues, Social Imagery and Epistemic Issues) are assumed to be distinct and separate, they can be treated as independent (predictive) variables with the voter's intention as a dependent or predicted variable. The three models were tested and the resuits of path analysis show the complex pattern of mutual interdependence between the cognitive domains and voter behavior. The specificity of the cause-effect relationship obtained by the structural equation methodology presented in the paper allows us to put forward some practical suggestions regarding the way electoral campaigns should be conducted.