Access to justice for Aboriginal People in the Northern Territory

This article discusses research in the Northern Territory on Aboriginal civil and family law needs. It is based on focus group discussions and interviews with legal services providers and other associated organisations. The article argues that key areas of legal need involve discrimination, housing, child protection, social security, credit/debt and consumer law problems. It further argues that welfare conditionality, particularly as embodied in the NT Intervention and subsequent Stronger Futures policies, has exacerbated the need for legal assistance and advocacy for Aboriginal people.     

Female Perceptions of Organizational Justice

This study examines women's conceptualization of the pervasive construct of organizational justice. A comprehensive four factor model was used to represent organizational justice while outcome variables were the important employee attitudes of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse responses from 301 male and 147 female respondents. Differences were found for procedural, interpersonal and informational justices. It would appear female and male employees have differing responses to perceptions of justice. Justice had a diffuse effect for males, but not for females. For men, interpersonal justice predicted an increase in organizational commitment while procedural justice predicted a decrease in turnover intentions. For female employees, informational justice was found to increase commitment and reduce turnover intentions. The study highlights the need for all justice factors to be considered and for sex differences to be considered in future justice research.     

Reframing Resilience: Equitable Access to Essential Services

We urgently need to put the concept of resilience into practice if we are to prepare our communities for climate change and exacerbated natural hazards. Yet, despite the extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both remain useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider essential services or how access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, health care, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption are paramount to community resilience. We propose a new conceptualization of community resilience that is based on access to essential services. This reframing of resilience facilitates a new measure of resilience that is spatially explicit and operational. Using two illustrative examples from the impacts of Hurricanes Florence and Michael, we demonstrate how decisionmakers and planners can use this framework to visualize the effect of a hazard and quantify resilience-enhancing interventions. This “equitable access to essentials” approach to community resilience integrates with spatial planning, and will enable communities not only to “bounce back” from a disruption, but to “bound forward” and improve the resilience and quality of life for all residents.     

The sociological landscape of youth confinement

This article examines key sociological questions that are raised by the confinement of children and young people. Globally, there are approximately one million children held in confinement, and there is an emerging body of qualitative sociological research in this area. This article examines the role that social constructions of childhood innocence and evil play in shaping the processes of protection and removal, and how these constructions play a role in mediating state strategies of punishment and rehabilitation. The article also draws from an emerging body of qualitative sociological research to examine the role of youth confinement institutions in socializing vulnerable young people.     

Climate justice and sustained transnational mobilization

ABSTRACT

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. Here I review evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements germane for understanding the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change have created an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization for confronting neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models for building an enduring international organization that will represent subaltern groups and have a substantial impact on world politics.     

The racialized patterns of police violence: The critical importance of research as praxis

The tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police resulted in hundreds of thousands of protestors marching in the streets demanding change. The call for change criticized the killing of Blacks by law enforcement and challenged White supremacy as an institution of social control and racial violence. A key component of the marches and protests was a message to the residents of the United States: “Black Lives Matter.” As society grapples with a reckoning, researchers studying police violence for the past 6 decades have been empirically and theoretically debating the reasons why use of force by law enforcement continues to have a higher proportion of Black and Brown victims compared to Whites. Although the research on fatal police killings was studied by only a small number of individuals prior to 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the research in different areas of the country increased rapidly as did the forms of analysis and research disciplines making their own contributions. The Washington Post and Guardian news agencies established that deaths at the hands of the police were occurring for at least 900 to 1100 individual deaths per year for which firearms resulted in the greatest cause of death. As US government agencies failed to produce a national data source on police involved killings, the media took a leading role in providing greater national understanding. The authors examine what role academic researchers contribute to the discussion for solutions, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. As protestors march, lawyers sue and defend, and politicians create new forms of legislation, researchers need to play a more important role initiating critical studies, making sense of the data, and providing a theoretical framework for which police violence can be understood. This article will provide an overview of the literature on racialized police violence, point out key patterns involving racial and ethnic disparities, and emphasize how researchers can play a more important role in advocating for change.     

在公正与效率之间:证人出庭作证制度的困境和出路

证人出庭作证问题,涉及证明标准与法律假设、法律规则与法律标准、诉讼效率与诉讼成本、自利偏见与社会效应等诸多方面。证人不出庭作证的规范依据仍然存在、证人出庭作证的权利和义务不对等、配套措施不完善等原因,导致证人不愿意出庭。美国辩诉交易制度在很大程度上减少了开庭刑事案件的数量,其关于书面陈述的规定也减少了证人出庭作证的需求,在一定程度上实现了被告人人权保护和公共利益的平衡,值得借鉴。完善证人出庭作证制度,应以案件"客观需要"为标准,以追求事实真相为出发点,以人权保护和人性回归为落脚点,遵循限制性处罚原则和禁止利益冲突原则,提高相关规定的可操作性。因此,不宜盲目追求证人高出庭作证率。     

对中国社会经济改革进程中收入不平等的认知:一个同期群组的分析

不同群组在对收入不平等的态度上是否会因为个人经历不同的时代背景而产生差异?运用2005年中国综合社会调查的数据,比较四组拥有不同时代背景经历的群组,在转型期对收入不平等的看法。研究结果显示,年龄较老的群组对于收入不平等持有更多批评而年轻群组则对收入不平等有着更为宽容的态度,考虑不同群组中的不同自身利益之后并不能大幅度降低人们对收入不平等的态度上的差异。研究进一步表明,更重要的中介因素是人们对社会公正的信念。     

解码“中国经济增长”

消费是人类经济增长最初也是最终的目的，单纯为了经济增长速度、为了增加就业、为了出口创汇等，可能脱离经济发展的消费目的，未必有利于真正的经济增长。新时期中国理想的经济增长必须考虑以下六个制约因素，即居民增长的消费需求、资源的供给、环境容量、国际竞争力、科技创新和制度。关键是突出消费作为增长的目的，抛弃狭隘的速度思维，将环境保护放在首位，以分配公平为前提，建立有责任约束的经济增长机制。     

Decency and the Liberal International (Dis)Order: Moral Limits and the Possibilities of a Global Pluralist Politics

This article analyzes the tension between the liberal ideals of freedom and equality and cultural difference. It argues that decency has become intertwined with the fragility of the liberal international order by providing a problematic threshold of international justice. The idea is that as global pressures mount for protecting the human dignity of persons/peoples, they also congeal or harden decency’s political and social constraints (impartiality, neutrality, and basic rights enforcement) on engaging others. Decency as a moral threshold of international justice, the article claims, has become static or a self-reinforcing limitation. This contradictory decency/dignity dynamic of the liberal international order not only explains how states have aggressively asserted their interests by absorbing these constraints, but also how politics can limit the pragmatic potential to bridge the various social gaps in values and belief systems. This article seeks to conceptualize a pluralist ethos that shows how such constraints can be reimagined as, or turned into, the conditions of possibility/freedom that transition us to a global pluralist politics. It concludes with a discussion of the refugee crisis and Islamism, showing how both cases resonate the felt stigmatization and alienation within the liberal international order.