ENTERTAINING TORTURE,EMBODYING LAW

Torture appears as an image: once, of sovereign power, more recently, of acts performed on people not even defined as prisoners. It served to instruct, now it serves to entertain, as image and spectacle. Law's entertaining of torture both enables the spectacles seen (and not seen) since Abu Ghraib, and intersects with wider cultural practices, especially in cinema and television. Torture has been a form of entertainment as much as it has been a subject of revulsion. Recent justifications of torture have sought cinematic backing. The US Justice Department torture memos, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and beyond, link attitudes towards torture with a culture of entertainment and spectacle, up to the point at which the law comes to entertain torture. At stake in both spectacle and actual practices is a form of corporeal sovereignty: the wholeness of the sovereign against the brokenness of any body that would threaten such wholeness. This paper explores these intersections, along with the logic of a sovereign disregard for the body, through readings of the torture memos, First Blood, and the investigations into prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.     

Explicating Public Diplomacy as Organization–Public Relationship (OPR): An Empirical Investigation of OPRs between the US Embassy in Seoul and South Korean College Students

Based on a theoretical proposition that public diplomacy can be explicated as management of organization–public relationship (OPR) between an organization concerned and foreign publics, practical and functional utility of OPR measures was empirically investigated in this preliminary study within a public diplomacy context involving the US embassy in Seoul and South Korean college students. Validating reliability and validity of Hon and J. E. Grunig's (1999 Hon , L. C. , & Grunig , J. E. ( 1999 ). Guidelines for measuring relationships in public relations . Gainesville , FL : Institution for Public Relations . [Google Scholar]) OPR measures in evaluating the quality of relationships between the US embassy and South Korean college students, the findings help further advance the theoretical and practical convergence of public relations and public diplomacy. In addition, with statistically significant links between South Korean college students' perceived relationships with the US embassy and their attitudes and behavioral intentions toward the United States and its citizens, the findings suggest that public diplomacy outcomes are related to OPR management, to some degree.     

'Blood Meridian', or the evening redness in the east: 'itinerant degenerates bleeding westwards'

Abstract

Blood Meridian (1985), written a decade after US withdrawal from Vietnam and even as Reaganite policies actively destabilized Nicaragua and sustained the despicable in El Salvador, centres nominally on Sonora, Mexico. However, we argue that, from the perspective of the post-1975 USA, Sonora specifically and systematically resembles South Vietnam, with the Treaty of Guadalupe (1848) resembling the Geneva Agreements of 1954. Central to McCarthy's demystification of the chronological and global reach of US imperialism is the figure of the Judge, readable as a personification of the US permanent arms economy and a tour guide to genocide. In a 20th century characterized by mass murder and enforced migration of peoples, it is appropriate that a judge, a representative of the state, should embody what has constituted the activity of modern governments.     

The lawyers’ war: states and human rights in a transnational field

While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states, the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ waged by the US has been distinguished by the open acknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of, these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mobilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between the spread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasingly adhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is not inconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would expect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than pure hypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legal infrastructure to support the use of ‘forbidden’ practices such as torture and assassination, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-order accounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administration developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal, technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which had turned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a more robust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better explain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states.     

“Its Own Kind of Torture”: Denial,Acknowledgment, and the Debate About Force Feeding at Guantánamo Bay

Social science research has revealed how U.S. political and media elites, as well as U.S. citizens, downplayed and denied allegations of torture during the country's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This research effectively applies and extends Stanley Cohen's ( 2001 ) typology of the rhetoric of denial. We lack, however, a typology of the rhetoric of acknowledgment. In this article, I synthesize studies of discourse of torture to develop just such a typology. I propose three rhetorical forms of acknowledgment, which parallel Cohen's forms of denial. Literal or factual acknowledgment includes claims to convince audiences that alleged incidents indeed occurred. Interpretive acknowledgment consists of claims to affirm that those allegations constitute serious human rights violations, such as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or torture. Implicatory acknowledgment includes efforts to delegitimize torture. I then illustrate the use of the rhetoric of acknowledgment through a qualitative content analysis of newspaper coverage of force feeding at the United States' detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This case allows me to extend our understanding of the rhetoric of denial and acknowledgment by revealing ways in which discourse around force feeding deviates from that around the United States' use of “enhanced interrogation” and torture.     

Mediation Effects of Organization–Public Relationship Outcomes on Public Intentions for Organizational Supports

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the value of organization–public relationship (OPR) outcomes by examining the mediation effects of relationship outcomes on key antecedents of stakeholders' support for a not-for-profit organization, which include awareness, attitude, and behavioral intention toward supportive relationship-building. To this end, a survey was conducted with individual donors of a not-for-profit organization. Key findings include strong positive effects of awareness of organizational relationship-building activities in beliefs about OPR outcomes and on the intention to engage in relationship-building, such as giving donations. In addition, this study found that OPR outcomes play a critical role in connecting such effects of awareness to the intention of supportive behaviors.     

The History of 0

When time has erased all details and ambiguities concerning the Iraq war the Abu Ghraib pictures will still be remembered, for two interrelated reasons. First, the pictures may be seen as part of a particularly cruel form of torture, in which the act of exposure multiply the feeling of shame. The significance of the pictures rests not in what they depict but in the fact that they were taken at all. The sexual nature of the torture, the use of the camera to multiply the feeling of shame, and the fact that the soldiers through their inclusions in the frame show no shame constitute their truly shocking nature. Second, the pictures provoked significant debate. They were used as forms of resistance against the “coalition of the willing”, with the Bush government afterwards trying to exercise damage control. The reason that the pictures had such impact was not the event itself — the fact that torture was applied. Most people know that such acts occur in wars. However, the various photographs, especially the hooded man in the “Jesus Christ pose” with wires attached to his limbs, had iconic potential. On a more fundamental level the perverse practices known from the prison worked as a secret and disavowed basis of American power, which was brought to light. Suddenly, American ideals appeared on the same plane as their constitutive exceptions. This left the administration with the choice of either denying the existence of this “downside” or in generalizing the exception (legalizing torture etc.). It was in fact by not choosing one of the strategies, but playing both cards simultaneously, that the Bush government lost so much prestige.     

Contributions of unrestricted funds: The donor organization–public relationship and alumni attitudes and behaviors

This exploratory pilot study examined alumni attitudes and behaviors toward making contributions in a nonprofit higher education organizational setting. The theoretical base of the study was that nonprofit higher education organizations operate in competitive marketing environments within a resource dependence open systems framework. In an effort to better understand alumni donor attitudes and behaviors in this context, this research explored the predictive relationship between the donor organization–public relationship (OPR) and alumni donor attitudes toward willingness to contribute unrestricted funds and donor behaviors concerning size of gifts made, frequency per year of contributions, and frequency of years of contributions using Huang's (2001) organization–public relationship assessment. Results indicate that donor OPR significantly predicts alumni donor attitudes toward willingness to contribute unrestricted funds. The results do not support that donor OPR significantly predicts size of gifts made, frequency per year of contributions, and frequency of years of contributions.     

Education after Abu Ghraib

Drawing upon Theodor Adorno's famous essay, ‘Education After Auschwitz, ‘this article examines the question of how education should be engaged in light of the abuse and torture by American soldiers and personnel that took place at Abu Ghraib prison. The essay attempts to understand not only how the photographs of abuse and torture signalled a particular form of public pedagogy, but also how pedagogy itself becomes central to understanding the changing political, ideological, and economic conditions that made the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib possible and what the latter implies for how we understand both cultural politics and the growing authoritarian nature of American society.     

Towards an assessment for organizational participatory research health partnerships: A systematic mixed studies review with framework synthesis

Within the health sciences, organizational participatory research (OPR) is defined as a blend of research and action, in which academic researchers partner with health organization members. OPR is based on a sound partnership between all stakeholders to improve organizational practices. However, little research on the evaluation of OPR health partnership exists. This systematic mixed studies review sought to produce a new theoretical model that structures the evaluation of the OPR processes and related outcomes of OPR health partnerships. Six bibliographic databases were searched together with grey literature sources for OPR health partnership evaluation questionnaires. Six questionnaires were included, from which a pool of 95 OPR health partnership evaluation items were derived. The included questionnaires were appraised for the quality of their origin, development and measurement properties. A framework synthesis was performed using an existing OPR framework by organizing questionnaire items in a matrix using a hybrid thematic analysis. This led to our proposed Organizational Participatory Research Evaluation Model (OPREM) that includes three axes, Trust, Collective Learning and Sustainability (with specific dimensions) and 95 items. This model provides information to help stakeholders comprehensively structure the evaluation of their partnerships and subsequent improvement; thus, potentially helping to improve health organization practices.     

OPR and its corruption of “publics”: A critique

This paper advances existing critiques of the organization-public relationship (OPR) research tradition by explicating the poor ontological conceptualization of publics in OPR research as well as related methodological concerns. The authors critically analyze the publics and OPR literature, furthering past criticisms and raising new questions about the heuristic value of OPR research. The paper points out three major weaknesses of the OPR tradition in its use of publics: (1) serious vacillation in terms resulting in conceptual inconsistencies, (2) inappropriate operationalization of variables and the use of probability sampling, and (3) a lack of insightful context and inclusion of relationship factors in OPR studies, to which publics are inextricably bound. The critique cautions scholars engaged in OPR research to improve their literature reviews and to enlarge their methodologies beyond a narrow scope of relational variables, which are theoretically fragile if not devoid of research value. Finally, the critique suggests the importance of conceptualizing publics in ways that acknowledge their agency.     

Status of organization–public relationship research from an analysis of published articles, 1985–2004

This study analyzes trends and patterns of research about organization-public relationships (OPR) through a content analysis of articles published between 1985 and 2004. The current status of OPR studies suggests that we have made progress in OPR research over the past two decades but need to explicate, replicate and extend the existing studies and cumulate the research trend.     

Emotions in organization–public relationships: Proposing a new determinant

Emotions have been left largely out of debate over the indicators that make up organization–public relationship (OPR) frameworks. This exploratory study analyses the importance of emotions in OPR. Results show that emotions are highly influential in this relationship. On these grounds, the paper suggests expanding existing conceptual analyses of OPR to include emotions.     

Understanding the donor experience: Applying stewardship theory to higher education donors

This study sought to discover how stewardship strategies and involvement impact organization-public relationship (OPR) outcomes for higher education donors at three different levels of giving. The first study to compare annual donors, major gift donors with one endowment, and major gift donors with two or more endowments suggests that each donor type experiences stewardship and OPR differently. Specifically, as donors deepen their giving relationship with an institution, they experience stewardship and OPR outcomes more positively. Additionally, involvement only slightly contributes to this relationship between stewardship and OPR outcomes. Findings also reveal that stewardship may include only three strategies, including a new concept called respect. Implications for fundraising practice and theory are made.     

Factors affecting children's disclosure of secrets in an investigatory interview

The present study aimed to identify how children's understanding of the investigatory interview process influenced their disclosure of secrets. Forty‐four 6‐year‐ and 7‐year‐old children participated in the study. Four short stories were read to each child. The stories were about young children who witnessed an event (e.g. witnessing a person stealing a pizza) and were asked to keep the witnessed event secret, then they were interviewed by an authority figure (e.g. security guard) and asked repeatedly about what they had witnessed. After each story, a series of questions were asked that related to factors that might aid the disclosure of the secret. Three main factors were investigated: children's perception of the interviewer's knowledge of the incident; children's perception of the purpose of the interview; and children's understanding of the purpose of asking repeat questions. Results indicated that a child's perception of how much an interviewer appeared to know about a secret, and whether the child was repeatedly asked about the secret do influence a child's disclosure of a secret. However, there was no effect for the purpose of the interview. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.     

Looking back,moving forward: A review and reflection of the organization-public relationship (OPR) research

Organization-Public Relationship (OPR), as a key concept addressed in the field of public relations has attracted wide attention in the past three decades. This study presents a comprehensive review of 156 relevant studies from 1998 to 2016 and categorizes them into five main clusters, which include the outcomes, antecedents, mediation, process, and structure of OPR. Findings also identify five gaps in current OPR research such as idealized propositions based on mutual benefits, a lack of research on multi-party relationships, problematic “trust” as the measurement, unilateral self-reported research data, and dominated cross-sectional methods By drawing contingency theory of accommodation and the relationship management theory, this study proposes the concept of contingent organization-public relationship (COPR) for future studies that seek to explore variations of OPR longitudinally.     

Migrants and asylum seekers: policy responses in the United States to immigrants and refugees from Central America and the Caribbean

This article analyzes the complex political environment of US immigration and refugee policies in which tensions exist, especially with regard to Central America and the Caribbean. Recommendations for managing it more effectively in the future are discussed. Several western countries, including the US, have implemented stricter restriction policies as a result of the perceived threats to their economies and cultural homogeneity. In general, US immigration policy has addressed both economic concerns and domestic pressures, whereas US refugee policy has reflected foreign policy concerns. As a result of these policies, there has been an increasing number of immigrants from Mexico, as well as huge numbers of refugees from Cuba and Nicaragua. Yet, there has been limited acceptance of asylum seekers from Haiti, El Salvador and Guatemala. Among the policies passed by the US Congress to reduce illegal immigration and limit assistance to legal immigrants were the Welfare Reform Act, Illegal Immigration Reform, Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996, and the Proposition 187 movement. Revisions in the procedures of the Immigration and Naturalization Service were also made.     

Relationship matters: How government organization-public relationship impacts disaster recovery outcomes among multiethnic communities

Government and emergency management (EM) agencies play a leading role in managing natural disasters. However, it is less well understood how the quality of the relationship between government and various publics may impact long-term disaster-coping and recovery outcomes. Extending the relationship management framework to the context of disaster management, the current study tests the relationships among different ethnic publics’ OPR quality, their communicative behaviors of seeking government and EM information, and disaster-coping outcomes. Results suggest that government OPR quality is positively related to information seeking and major disaster-coping outcomes, including self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and community resilience perceptions. Moreover, the extent to which OPR quality impacts disaster-coping outcomes significantly diverges across ethnic lines. Results provide implications for multicultural relationship management in the context of post-disaster recovery and community building.     

Revisiting organization–public relations research over the past decade: Theoretical concepts,measures, methodologies and challenges

This paper develops a better understanding of organization–public relationships (OPR) by analyzing empirical studies published in academic periodicals from 2000 to early 2011. A clear trend in the early years of the past decade was a greater focus on scale development, whereas in the latter half of the decade the emphasis was on scale application. Two main streams of OPR research reflect distinct clusters of authorship and research foci. In addition to providing a research summary, this study consolidates the lessons learned from OPR scholarship and provides suggestions for future research.