Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: While numerous studies have revealed the disparate treatment of minority drivers during vehicle stops, few have been able to attribute these disparities to racial profiling. This failure has largely been blamed on the fact that data sources, most notably vehicle stop data, do not provide sufficient information on if or how officers used a suspect’s race/ethnicity in their decision-making processes. However, I contend the problem is conceptual—our narrow understanding of racial profiling is overly concerned with individual officers and explicitly discriminatory decision-making, neglecting both the history of racial profiling and institutional factors that shape and direct police action. To remedy this, I propose that empirical research focus on identifying evidence of pretext stops—a high-discretion tactic linked to the genesis of the racial profiling controversy. Through the analysis of vehicle stop data from the Eugene (OR) Police Department (EPD), I highlight a pattern that indicates that stops involving black and Latino drivers were more likely to be pretextual in nature, demonstrating that EPD treated these drivers with higher levels of suspicion regardless of individual officers’ intent. This technique holds considerable promise for both the re-examination of existing data and the development of new vehicle stop data studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper looks at the increase in financial regulation in the wake of September 11 designed to stop terrorist financing and its implications for financial exclusion. The channels through which the terrorist had been able to finance their acts became an important focus for policy initiatives after the September 11 attacks, and some observers saw in increased financial regulation a window of opportunity to tackle money laundering, financial crime and tax evasion. For example, the US Patriot Act included measures to increase the reporting requirements of a range of financial institutions including mutual funds and made it more difficult for US banks to deal with institutions in known tax havens. This paper argues that, in practice, the measures designed to target terrorist finance have exacerbated financial exclusion in the US and have made it more difficult for migrant workers to remit money. In particular, the risk-based approach which is increasingly deployed to define and seek out suspect financial transactions, lead to the exclusion of migrants and foreign nationals from the mainstream banking system. As example, the paper will discuss the public campaign called 'Stopping Terrorism Starts with Stopping the Money', which was launched by US Treasury in April 2003. The paper will conclude by linking these financial developments to wider debates concerning civil liberties and definitions of terrorist risk.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Research findings across the country have reported that racial and ethnic disparities exist in dispositions received during traffic stops with police. Theories of police behavior suggest, however, that a host of situational and legal factors influence police decision-making during traffic stops over and above the influence of motorists’ race/ethnicity. Other theories suggest that individual officer, organization, and community characteristics may also partially explain officer behavior. Using traffic stop data collected by the Cleveland Division of Police during a six-month period in 2005, these theories of police behavior are examined. Using multivariate statistical modeling, the impact of drivers’ characteristics over coercive police behavior (i.e., citations and arrests) is assessed while statistically controlling for other relevant factors. The implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Ten years of murdering women with impunity in the border city of Cuidad Juarez, have led to the city's new designation as the best place in the world to murder a woman. As maquiladoras have attracted increasing numbers of young women from the countryside into Mexican border cities, Cuidad Juarez has become infamous for the number of unsolved murders of its women. With a mounting death toll, an international campaign has developed to bring pressure on the Mexican federal government to intervene. This campaign shows the growing potential for international human rights and feminists organizations to work together effectively on local issues.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: One of the most unfortunate features of International Relations as a discipline is the existence of a self-appointed "Philosophy of Science Police." When writing, presenting, debating, or publishing one's research, one always risks being told one's ontology is wrong or one's epistemology is untenable -- or worse, both. Ever since the emergence of the so-called "Third Debate" between positivists and post-positivists in the late eighties, philosophy-of-science arguments have been explicitly deployed by IR theorists in support of their own worldview and, even more frequently, as a weapon hurled against the world views of paradigmatic competitors. In this paper, we argue this approach to IR-theorizing is wrongheaded. Importing philosophy-of-science arguments into IR theory neither contributes to the resolution of the philosophical debates on which they draw nor advances our understanding of politics among states. We show why this is the case and advance an alternative perspective drawing on the pragmatic philosophy of science of Arthur Fine's "The Natural Ontological Attitude." We argue that NOA would serve well the purposes of political scientists in general and IR theorists in particular, as it is a minimalist philosophy of science aimed at insulating scientific practice from foundational philosophical questions that remain deeply contested within philosophy of science itself. By devolving scrutiny back to the internal standards of the field, a pragmatic approach to the philosophy of science makes room for theoretical and methodological pluralism.