A Hero’s Welcome? Exploring the Prevalence and Problems of Military Veterans in the Arrestee Population

The potential for veterans to end up in the criminal justice system as a result of physical and psychological problems that may be combat‐related has generated much interest, illustrated most recently by the development of specialized veterans’ courts. However, little is known about how often veterans are arrested and incarcerated, the nature of their problems, or the extent to which their military service has contributed to their criminality. Using interview data from 2,102 arrestees booked in Maricopa County (AZ) during 2009, this paper examines the problems and prior experiences of arrested military veterans and compares veteran and non‐veteran arrestees along a range of measures. Results indicate that veterans comprise 6.3% of the arrestee population, and that more than 50% of veterans report suffering from at least one combat‐related problem including physical injury, post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), other mental health problems, and substance abuse. Multivariate analysis indicates that veteran arrestees differ from non‐veterans on a number of key measures, most notably more frequent arrests for violent offenses and greater use of crack cocaine and opiates. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for the potential link between military service and criminality as well as for criminal justice policy and practice.     

Haste Makes Waste

正Allegations of cyber spying are counterproductive to Sino-U.S.relations Washington broke out in full legalistic fury and filed judicial litigation against five Chinese military officers on May19,accusing them of hacking into U.S.corporations’networks to steal trade secrets.     

Ethical,legal, social,and policy issues in the use of genomic technology by the U.S. Military

Advances in genomic science are attracting the interest of the U.S. military for their potential to improve medical care for members of the military and to aid in military recruitment, training, specialization, and mission accomplishment. While researchers have explored the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by the use of genomic science in a wide variety of contexts, there has been virtually no examination of these issues in connection with the use of genomics by the military. This article identifies potential uses of genomic science by the military, proposes an applicable ethical and legal framework, and applies the framework to provide ethical and legal guidance for military decision-makers.     

Vietnam: a case of military obsolescence in developing countries

ABSTRACT

Military obsolescence affects the capability of all militaries as it relates to serviceability and performance when countering potential opponents, and more specifically in the case of developing countries lacking strong indigenous defence industries. The gradual nature of this military concern has not been studied systematically, in contrast to military modernisation. This paper presents a synthetic framework composed of several indicators to examine military obsolescence. Vietnam has been selected for the application of the framework for its large number of Cold War legacies and the strategic pressure from China. Hanoi's ageing assets would undermine its position vis-à-vis Beijing, and its defence investment policies face the dilemma of choosing to spend more on naval and aerial power, or ameliorating its army which is technologically lacking compared to its Chinese counterpart.     

Native rhythms in the city: embodied refusal among Uyghur male migrants in Ürümchi

Over the past two decades, state-directed Han settlement and capitalist development in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia have uprooted thousands of Uyghurs, causing them to move to the city. In this article, I explore how low-income male Uyghur migrants and Uyghur culture producers build a durable existence despite these challenges. Based on analysis of migrant responses to the Uyghur-language urban fiction and indigenous music as well as ethnographic observations of Uyghur migrants from Southern Xinjiang, I argue that indigenous knowledge provides underemployed male Uyghurs a means to refuse the alienating effects of settler colonialism and economic development. By broadening the scope of what counts as ‘resistance’ to Chinese attempts to eliminate aspects of Uyghur society, I show that ‘refusal’ can be a generative way of embodying sovereignty, particularly when confronted by structural violence.     

Parroting the past: historical continuity and change through cultures of cruelty in Brazil

ABSTRACT

In the recent Brazilian Netflix series 3% (Aguilera 2016), international audiences were presented with an array of visual reminders about the legacy of historic human rights abuses in Brazil. With the image of the pau de arara as a point of historic and semiotic reference, this paper adopts evidence and ideas from New Capitalist History to extend the interrogation of the historical memory of torture in Brazil in particular, to the rise and predominance of coercive practices in workplace cultures in free societies in general. This interrogation demonstrates the need for paradigm shifts within Western academic disciplines. First, to re-locate historically modern slavery in political philosophy as central to conceptions of “evil,” and second to overturn the notion of discontinuity and incompatibility between slavery and capitalism. Throughout this interrogation, a short story by Machado de Assis and Lissovsky’s critique of processes of memorialisation of human rights abuses open up the possibility of revisionist thinking about technologies of power, under slavery, military rule, and democratic regimes in Brazil; an approach which suggests systematic and sustained “cultures of cruelty” past and present (Giroux).     

Paid military service at the intersection of militarism,nationalism, capitalism,and (hetero)patriarchy: escaping without leaving ‘manhood’

The variety of the political standpoints of governments that have initiated exempted military service for several times in Turkey is a sign of a general agreement on its legitimacy. However, Turkey is a country where conscientious objection is almost a taboo. I try to decipher the assumptions behind what is (il)legitimate, and their manifestations in the sociopolitical life from a gender perspective informed by the feminist theory. I argue that what lies behind these is the interconnection between militarism, nationalism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I show how they reciprocally support each other through a critical discourse analysis of the debate on legitimacy of paid military service and illegitimacy of conscientious objection. I conclude that the nature of these debates leads to a reproduction of the hegemonic definitions of manhood and womanhood, together with the reproduction of the masculinization of the political sphere at the expense of the exclusion of and discrimination against other identities.     

Why Democratic Allies Defect Prematurely: Canadian and Dutch Unilateral Pullouts from the War in Afghanistan

Why do some democratic allies prematurely withdraw from ongoing military US-led coalition operations? Why are some democratic allies more reliable than others? This article proposes a multifactorial integrated framework consisting of several causal mechanisms drawn from ideological, domestic, and alliance explanations of premature defection. It compares and contrasts two neglected case studies, namely the Canadian and Dutch withdrawal of combat troops from NATO’s counterinsurgency mission in southern Afghanistan. The comparative analysis finds that democratic institutional designs, parliamentary war powers, leadership turnover, as well alliance dependence and threat perceptions did not play a meaningful role in both cases of premature defection. It rather finds that domestic elite consensus interacted with electoral calculations to account for pullout choices. Right-wing ideological beliefs held by state executives also slowed down the decision to withdraw, and alliance pressures interacted with domestic elite consensus to account for commitment renewal into a noncombat mission. The article concludes with some implications for the theory of democratic alliance reliability.     

Technology and Politics: Have the ICTs Turned into a Domain for Civil–Military Relations in Turkey?

The implications of technology have been widely acknowledged in international relations. Studies ranging from the causes of war and military effectiveness to terrorism and nuclear proliferation have explored how technology shapes international politics. However, the implications of technology in domestic politics have not been scrutinised much. This paper helps fill this vacuum through an analysis of Turkey’s civil–military relations. Although civilian control over the Turkish military has improved in the past decade, this process has not been smooth. With a focus on the recent court cases involving the military, the 2007 e-memorandum and the transfer of electronic military intelligence apparatus to the civilian authority, this paper demonstrates how technology has become an important domain for civil–military relations in Turkey.     

Military frames and Canada’s Conservative government: from extending to transforming perceptions of Canadian identity

This article looks at framing strategies behind the recent Canadian Conservative government’s rhetoric on the military. Critics argue that Conservative rhetoric has politicised Canadian history and overemphasised the armed forces. Few scholars, however, have looked at the specific forms this rhetoric took and the strategies it suggested. The article presents the results of a systematic analysis of Conservative rhetoric between 2005 and 2015. It argues that three key frame alignment strategies were at the heart of the Conservative Government’s rhetoric: extension, consolidation and transformation, with truly transformative rhetoric transpiring only in the last phase. While agreeing with critics that this emphasis on the military aimed to alter perceptions of Canadian identity, the article shows that Conservative rhetoric was far from and monolithic.