Category
Recent Posts
- Evaluating civil development in counterinsurgency operations: the case for a field experiment in Afghanistan
- Karl Rove's Ghost of Gilded Age Past
- The formation of Australian mining technology services and equipment suppliers
- Foreign intervention and warfare in civil wars
- Entrepreneurship in Australia: the missing links
Archive
- February 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- September 2011
- July 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- June 2009
- April 2009
- December 2008
- October 2008
- July 2008
- December 2007
- October 2007
Publications FeedJournal Articles
Evaluating civil development in counterinsurgency operations: the case for a field experiment in Afghanistan
3 February 2012
It is a widely held belief that civil development programs play a central role in any counterinsurgency campaign. It is assumed that civil development assistance is key to ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the civilian population, which, in turn, is crucial for victory. However, there is currently little evidence to support this belief. This article by Dr Adam Lockyer begins by analysing the different methods that have been used in Afghanistan in order to evaluate the effectiveness of civil development programs since 2001. It finds that these methods have severe limitations. Indeed, based solely upon current methods of evaluation, we have no reliable evidence whether civil development programs are actively improving security, having no impact or making matters worse. As such, this article makes the case for a field experiment approach to be adopted in Afghanistan. It argues that field experiments are the most powerful methodology currently available to social scientists for making causal inferences and, by making minor changes to the way in which civil development is distributed, we can vastly improve our understanding of the relationship between aid and security. Read article
Karl Rove's Ghost of Gilded Age Past
14 December 2011
US Studies Centre postdoctoral fellow Marc Palen reviews William T. Horner's book Ohio's Kingmaker: Mark Hanna, Man and Myth. The book examines the life and partisan media portrayal of Gilded Age presidential advisor Mark Hanna, who has been commonly compared to former President George W. Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove. Read review
Foreign intervention and warfare in civil wars
16 November 2011
by Adam Lockyer
This article explains how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war influences the dynamics of the conflict. It submits that external assistance has the potential of affecting the military capabilities available to the belligerents. It then argues that the balance of those capabilities impacts significantly on whether the warfare in a civil war assumes a conventional, guerrilla or irregular form. These theoretical assertions are tested against the case of the Angolan Civil War. It is shown that during that war, variations in the form of warfare correlated closely to the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention given to each of the belligerents. Read article
Leadership: What it means, what it does, and what we want to know about it
15 May 2011
by John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi
Leaders are part of virtually all organized political life. There have been important recent advances in modeling "leaders" as well as clever and innovative empirical studies. We review recent contributions from the political science, economics, and management literatures. We discuss the extent to which these new works represent advances over the major classic works on leadership and organization from the twentieth century. We identify important gaps, chief among them (a) theorizing a role for coercion, (b) modeling the endogenous emergence of leaders, and (c) empirically disentangling the effect of an individual leader from her office, especially when leaders emerge endogenously. Read Article
Distinction, boundaries or bridges?: Children, inequality and the uses of consumer culture
28 February 2011
by Allison Pugh in Poetics
Much existing work in the sociology of culture implicitly assumes actor motivations of status and domination. Yet this theoretical consensus attends only glancingly to the flip side of such behavior: those moments when people deploy culture, not only in a mobility project, but to connect. Based on a three-year ethnography of children's consumer culture in three diverse communities, Pugh finds that children often use consumer culture to belong—both to connect to others, and to achieve visibility in their social worlds. Pugh contends that children's common desires make inequality, particularly in their access to consumer goods, a challenge to the accomplishment of the connection for which they strive. Using insights from Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, Pugh finds children use processes of facework to navigate the problems arising from their differences from others, including those stemming from discrepancies in commodity possession. Out of five facework processes that Pugh identifies, she elaborates upon two that seem to challenge the notion that children seek sameness. Children's goals for consumer culture also differed from those of (particularly affluent) adults. Pugh suggests scholars need to reconsider their theoretical emphasis on exclusion over inclusion, and document the circumstances under which each is particularly salient. Read Article
Measuring the gaps
16 December 2010
Center for American Progress
The Affordable Care Act in America expands the current requirements for the collection and analysis of health care disparities data. Dr Lesley Russell says these data will be critical for guiding both government policy and the programs and practices of individual health care institutions and providers. Dr Russell is a research associate at the US Studies Centre.
Read more
Easing the burden
16 December 2010
Center for American Progress
Lesley Russell contends the ultimate goal must be that all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, get the quality health care services they need when they need them. Dr Russell is a research associate at the US Studies Centre. Read more
Race, Risk, and Fiction in the War on Terror
3 December 2010
Literature Interpretation Theory
This article examines how racial perceptions manifest themselves across a range of post-9/11 fictions. Assistant Professor Georgiana Banita argues that American literature after 9/11 has sought to alleviate the pressure of racial discrimination by replacing a moral discourse based on race with a more ambiguous ethical approach that emphasizes risk, supported by narratives of contingency. Georgiana Banita is a postdoctoral fellow at the US Studies Centre. Read article
Beyond the Depleting Model of Parenting: Narratives of Childrearing and Change
30 November 2010
by Jennifer Silva and Allison Pugh in Sociological Inquiry
A great deal of scholarship investigates the effects of parenting on adults who parent. While existing literature has identified the ways in which parenting affects parents adversely, the authors argue that more attention needs to be paid to how having children may enhance parents' lives. Thus, we draw upon twenty-four in-depth interviews with young parents in order to investigate this process. First, the authors identify five ways in which parents say caregiving has changed their worldviews, relationships, and expectations, leading them to 1) erect barriers, 2) aspire for more, 3) view parenthood as a second chance, 4) hew a new path, and 5) make connections. Second, the authors uncover two central metaphors that parents rely on to explain the effect that having responsibility for children has had on their lives: the child as witness and the child as tether. The authors also point to future areas of investigation, arguing that only with an adequate understanding of what parenting does to parents can we understand what changing trends in families and inequality hold for ourselves and our futures. Read Article
From Charlie Chan to The karate kid—changing perceptions of oriental style
23 November 2010
Recent Hollywood action and science fiction movies are helping shape new images of East Asia, says Jane Park in the latest issue of Asian Currents. Read Article
VIDEOS & INTERVIEWS
Geoffrey Garrett says that Mitt Romney's greatest weakness is that many Americans see him as representing Wall Street: a place loathed even more at the moment than Capitol Hill.
Brendon O'Connor comments on the results of the South Carolina primary and looks ahead to Florida.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
