Reshaping Civil Society through a Truth Commission: Human Rights in Morocco's Process of Political Reform

¹Observers of Moroccan politics have debated extensively thesignificance of the country's ‘top-down’ liberalization.At this point, there is no definitive verdict on palace-guidedreforms, such as the recent Equity and Reconciliation Commission(IER). Rather, these reforms have left an ambiguous legacy.This article uses the IER – a truth commission establishedin 2004 to examine past human rights abuses, compensate victimsand ensure nonrepetition – as an analytical tool to understandhow transitional justice carried out as a strategic measureof top-down liberalization can reshape the relationship betweencivil society and the state. While the monarchy's reform effortsin Morocco have not (as of yet) led to a civil society capableof supporting a stable democratic transition, the article arguesthat these efforts have increased civil society's expectationsof gaining capacity and space to implement ethical goals anddemands. Greater expectations, in turn, have altered how themonarchy must calculate its survival strategy.     

Culture as Values or Culture in Action? Street Codes and Student Violent Offending

ABSTRACT

The authors draw on two competing cultural perspectives—culture as values and culture in action—to examine the relationship between street codes and the propensity to violently victimize others. Specifically, they explore whether individual-level and school-level street codes, net of one another, are related to 3 types of violence: assault, robbery, and sexual battery. In addition, they consider whether these effects vary according to 3 contextual characteristics: (a) the location of the offending—in school versus out of school, (b) school-level economic disadvantage, and (c) school efficacy. Three-level ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using four waves of survey data from over 3,000 students nested within 103 schools. Results provide evidence that individual-level street codes are related to violent offending in a manner that is, largely speaking, not tied to context. However, there is some evidence that the effects of school-level street codes on offending differ between outside of school and in school settings and are conditioned by levels of school disadvantage and efficacy. Overall, some support is offered for both the culture-as-values and culture-in-action perspectives.     

Peer pressure and adolescent substance use

Peer influence is regarded as one of the strongest determinants of juvenile delinquency and particularly adolescent substance use. A commonly held view is that social pressure from friends to use drugs and alcohol is a major contributor to substance use. Yet the notion of peer pressure, implied by the association between peer-group associations and drug behavior, is seldom tested empirically. As a crucial test of the group pressure model, this research examines the role of peer pressure in mediating the effect of differential association on individual use. Moreover, few studies examine the nature of the relationship between peers and substance use as it relates to the processes leading toand from use. Drawing on differential association and social learning theories, our research specifies the social processes (socialization, group pressure, social selection, and rationalization) which dictate particular causal pathways leading to and from substance use and then estimates the reciprocal influences among differential association, social pressure from peers, attitudes favorable toward substance use, and individual use. Using the 1977–1979 National Youth Survey panel data, we estimate a covariance structural equation model allowing for correlated measurement error. In the cross-sectional analyses, we find no main effects of overt peer pressure on substance use. Estimation of the reciprocal effects model also reveals that overt peer pressure does not significantly influence substance use and does not mediate the effect of differential association. Instead, the influences of socialization, social selection, and rationalization play significant roles in understanding substance use.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 American Society of Criminology meetings in Miami, Florida.     

Comparison of results for quantitative determination of morphine by radioimmunoassay, enzyme immunoassay, and spectrofluorometry.

The quantitative results (accuracy and precision) for determination of opiates by radioimmunoassay (RIA), enzyme immunoassay (EMIT), and spectrofluorometry on split samples are compared. A variety of physiological samples were studied, including random urine from a methadone maintenance clinic and postmortem urine, blood, bile, brain, and lung tissue from heroin-induced or heroin-related deaths. The opiate concentrations detected by the two immunoassay methods were in good agreement with each other in the absence of interfering substances which are believed to react with the antimorphine antibodies. The immunoassay results were in agreement within the relative standard deviation with the fluorometry results in 55% of the urine samples and 80% of the blood samples. The immunological methods are superior to fluorometry for quantitation of morphine in urine samples due to quenching interferences in fluorometry from urine. They were comparable to fluorometry for quantitation of morphine in blood samples.