Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: That irregular forces frequently and systematically breach IHL is a well documented fact. Nevertheless, compliance with IHL also appears to deteriorate among regular (western) forces. They seem to have taken on new roles and adapted their doctrine to the

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Google is arguably one of the most powerful companies within the media industry today. This paper is an analysis of the company’s headquarters, Googleplex. While the company’s presence on the Web leaves little for a critical analyst to approach, its headquarters has more to offer. The aim of the paper is to use the example of Google to explore how power is performed and organized in an informational culture and to investigate how the architecture of the Googleplex represents and takes part in this performance of power. The analysis shows that the Googleplex is active in both establishing Google’s claim to power – through utilizing different techniques related to the concepts of information, decentralization and self-organization – and at the same time downplays the centrality that is thus achieved.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Multiple studies have been conducted on the issue of U.S. black-white family formation differences in response to trends showing that African Americans are increasingly less likely than whites to ever marry, more likely to divorce when marriage does occur, and less likely than whites to remarry. Explanations generally focus on one of three theories, ranging from economic class and race stratification, the skewed gender ratio in the African-American marriage market, and historic and present cultural differences. This analysis takes a new approach to an old question. I ask what happens to marriage trends for blacks and whites when they are removed from larger society and placed in a new structural context. Specifically, I examine nuptial patterns among the races within the U.S. military, a total institution in the Goffmanian sense, which serves as a near natural control for many of the arguments presented in the literature on the race-driven retreat from marriage.

Why the military? The volunteer armed forces have long attracted disproportionate numbers of minorities because it is thought to offer comparatively better career opportunity and employment stability than the civilian sector. The gender ratio issue is also reversed in the military, favoring women on the order of 7 to 1, and the number of African American “marriageable men” who are financially stable is notably improved from the civilian marriage market. Most importantly, there is evidence that total institutionalism enables the military to effectively enforce nondiscriminatory policies, leading to improved race relations. Superior equal opportunity policy, desegregated housing and work conditions, and increased overall interracial interaction may serve as a control for the difficult to measure variable of racism in civilian society.

I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which is the only longitudinal database to contain a military sub-sample along with a civilian sample. To model the probability of marriage for both civilians and military personnel by race, I run a series of event history and multivariate propensity score matching analyses. I find that the racial differential in marital trends that exists in civilian society disappears in the military environment; African American and white marriage rates do not differ from one another in the military as they do in the civilian world. Beyond the lessened importance of race in predicting union formation, family formation rates for all military members are substantially higher than for civilians. Additional analyses testing the likelihood of marital dissolution using the 1999 Survey of Active Duty Personnel along with the 1999 Current Population Survey as its civilian analysis counterpart are currently underway.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For the past 2 years, I have been teaching a Sociology class on drugs and the criminal justice system, to University undergraduates in the same classroom along side work release inmates involved in the facility’s drug treatment program. This type of learning is truly transformational, and is modeled on a program called the Inside-Out Prison Exchange developed at Temple University by Criminal Justice professor Lori Pompa. My innovation has been the adaptation of this model to more fully explore drugs and society, with two groups of students that are strikingly familiar with and currently or previously involved in ‘heavy’ drug use. The class examines how drugs are related to other deviant behaviors, how drug users have historically and are currently treated by the criminal justice system and society at large, the efficacy of treatment both within and outside of the criminal justice system, and alternative models for societal responses to drugs (including examining other countries responses to the drugs-crime nexus). The seminar style class encourages in-depth discussion about issues that are often taboo in classrooms (deviant experiences) and solutions to societal problems among groups of students that differ in terms of class, race and gender. My role as facilitator is to encourage the discussion of tough questions to which there are no easy solutions, and expose students to alternative views and societal responses to drugs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper offers a contribution to the wider project of rereading classical strategy against classical strategy by turning from the phenomenologist of war, Clausewitz, to the phenomenologist of politics, Hannah Arendt. In particular, Arendt’s account of how late nineteenth century imperialism set off socio-military processes in the direction of total war in Europe enables us to rethink some of the foundational assumptions of classical strategy in a way Clausewitz cannot. Outside the civilized confines of Europe, Clausewitz considered the world to be in a constant state of war; he regarded primitive peoples as having an especially war-like spirit. Civilized war depended on the distinction between war and peace; it ended with the clear victory of one side over the other after a large-scale battle. As a result, civilized and savage wars were kept in separate boxes in nineteenth century military thought.

Hannah Arendt, in contrast, is an important forerunner of emerging efforts to read the post-colonial into strategic and security studies. Her ground-breaking work on the links between colonial war and total war in Europe in Origins of Totalitarianism has been central to all subsequent historical accounts. To date, the association, and the constitutive relationship between war in the North and South, has been rejected by classical strategy and military history. Following Clausewitz, this literature prefers to keep ‘small wars’ and conventional European war in separate boxes. Accordingly, Arendt provides an important corrective to this and a number of other conceptual and historical flaws of both strategic and international studies. Reading Arendt this way also contributes to filling a gap in the vast secondary literature on her work. There is no systematic account of Arendt’s writing on the war question and there are very few treatments of her thinking on imperialism. The few that have been attentive to the latter dimension of Arendt’s work misread her intentions and the subtlety of her thought.