(Re-)Setting the Scholarly Agenda on Transjudicial Communication

We consider the contributions made by Robert H. Bork's Coercing Virtue (2003) and Anne-Marie Slaughter's A New World Order (2004) to the ongoing debate over the citation of foreign law in United States courts. While empirically minded sociolegal scholars might be tempted to dismiss these books as mere op-eds, that would be a mistake. Taken with the spate of other recent work, they supply the makings of an agenda for rigorous research devoted to understanding the exchange of law among nations.     

Efficacy, Self-Derogation, and Alcohol Use Among Inner-City Adolescents: Gender Matters

Prior studies have found inconsistent relationships between measures of self-concept and adolescent alcohol use. The current study explored whether the link between various measures of self-concept and alcohol use depends on gender. In addition, earlier work suggested a focus on negative self-esteem (i.e., self-derogation) might be more useful in predicting alcohol use. Students (N = 1459) attending 22 middle and junior high schools in New York City completed surveys that included measures of efficacy, self-derogation, and alcohol use. Participants completed surveys at baseline, 1-year follow-up, and 2-year follow-up. Data collectors administered the questionnaire following a standardized protocol during a regular 40-min-class period. On the basis of a longitudinal structural equation model, lower efficacy was related to greater self-derogation a year later across gender. Increased self-derogation predicted higher alcohol use for girls but not boys. These findings are congruent with a literature highlighting the importance of negative thoughts about the self in drinking behavior for women but not men. The results suggest that the alcohol prevention approaches should include material to enhance girls' self-esteem.     

Two sides of the same coin: can campaigns generate support for both human rights and retributive violence?

ABSTRACT

Do framing strategies that are effective at encouraging pro-social behavior, such as participation in human rights campaigns, also mobilize support for violence within the same subjects? We use an experimental research design to examine individuals’ reactions to personal, humanizing narratives about past victimization. Participants are randomly assigned to one of eight treatment groups, which variously highlighted the humanity of the subject, the intensity of the past violence, and/or an evocative photograph of the subject that underscores her loss and vulnerability. We expect narratives that emphasize the subject’s humanity will encourage the audience to see the subject as innocent and as a victim, but also to feel angry about her experience. As a result, individuals will be more likely to defend the subject’s human rights, and to condone her use of retributive violence. We find that humanizing narratives lead respondents to simultaneously support a human rights appeal on the subject’s behalf and her use of retributive violence. Perceiving the subject in the narrative as innocent or as a victim mediates these effects, but anger often does not.     

Making the Invisible Visible: Disability Inclusive Development in Solomon Islands

International and national level disability inclusive discourse, policy and strategy typically render invisible the institutional structures, political economies and socio-cultural power relations that constitute the lived experience of disability. The lack of robust information on disability extends these theoretical blind spots to the absence of disability in official statistics, political dialogue and social policy. Empirically grounded, inclusive research that recognises disability as embedded in globalised political economies and culturally specific power relations is required to address the theoretical, statistical and programmatic invisibility of disability. Such research will provide a solid knowledge base on which to build effective inclusive interventions.     

RR v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: Empowering Tribunals to Enforce the Human Rights Act 1998

In RR v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions – follow-on litigation from the high-profile bedroom tax cases – the Supreme Court handed down a judgment which has significant implications for social security law, the interpretation of the Human Rights Act, the tribunals system, the judicial control of delegated legislation, and access to justice. Central, however, was the issue of the enforceability of human rights. We argue that the Supreme Court was not only justified in its interpretation of the Human Rights Act but that it has made the protections of the Act more easily enforceable.     

Examining Temporal Associations Between School Connectedness and Early Adolescent Adjustment

This study examined (a) the associations between school connectedness and early adolescent adjustment problems over a 1 year period and (b) the equivalence of these associations across gender. Five hundred middle school students (53.4% female), initially in the 6th and 7th grades, participated in the two-wave study. Results from two-group cross-lagged panel analyses were consistent across boys’ and girls’ data. After controlling for baseline levels of adjustment problems, school connectedness predicted lower levels of early adolescent conduct problems 1 year later. Regarding the opposite direction of associations, and even after baseline levels of school connectedness were taken into account, conduct problems predicted lower levels of subsequent school connectedness. There were no cross-lagged associations between depressive symptoms and school connectedness, although elevated levels of baseline depressive symptoms predicted higher levels of subsequent conduct problems. Findings elaborate previous research by demonstrating that early adolescents actively shape the middle school environment.

Al-Qadā’ wa-l-Qadr: motivational representations of divine decree and predestination in salafi-jihadi literature

This paper explores how the normative Islamic concepts of divine decree and predestination are used for motivational purposes in salafi-jihadi literature. These concepts are known as al-qa?ā’ wa-l-qadr within Islamic jurisprudence and assert that certain characteristics in an individual’s life—such as their lifespan, wealth and progeny—have already been preordained by God. Salafi-Jihadi groups, not least al-Qaeda and Islamic State, frame these concepts in unique and important ways to motivate their fighters on the battlefield, liberating them from fear of personal consequences. In particular, we examine the use of this concept not just to motivate fighters at a personal level, but also its role in maintaining morale during times of hardship, its ability to explain away failures and defeats, and its ability to project both momentum and success even when the facts suggest otherwise.     

Interrogating ‘invisibilization’ and ‘instrumentalization’: women and current citizenship trends in Canada

This paper examines current citizenship discourses and practices in Canada, focusing on the implications not only of marketization, but also of growing securitization vis-à-vis citizenship, and the gendered ramifications of such developments. The repercussions of marketization and securitization and their interrelations, for women in general, as well as racialized and immigrant women in particular, are outlined and assessed. In this way, we see how women are at the receiving end of highly contradictory processes in that they are both ‘invisibilized’, in other words, rendered invisible, by the Canadian state, but are also are increasingly ‘instrumentalized’, in other words, used in strategic ways. Yet, women also challenge these trends and tactics, thereby interrogating these processes that serve to limit the terms and scope of citizenship in Canada.