Justice Organizations Research Articles

?Neither Shall They Train for War Anymore?: Reflections on Zionism, Militarism, and Conscientious Objection

This article examines Socialist Zionism, the political philosophy that has indelibly shaped Israel's culture. In particular, this article reveals some of the ways in which this distinctly eastern European Zionism constructs gender and ethnicity in Israel, and how these constructions shape contemporary Israeli culture toward the radicalization of the conflict with the Palestinians. Simultaneously, it explores how Socialist Zionism has rendered invisible structural inequalities among Israeli Jews. Finally, this article describes the role of the Israeli military, a central Zionist institution, in both of these processes, as well as the role of Israeli peace and social justice organizations in countering militarism and promoting peace.

Condescension and Cross-Class Coalitions: Working Class Activists' Perspectives on the Role of Social Status

This piece focuses on working class activists' perspectives on cross-class coalitions, considering the influence of environmental justice activists' social status evaluations on experiences in cross-class coalition efforts with professional environmental activists. We ask: To what extent have cross-class coalitions been formed between working class and middle class environmental organizations? How did working class activists perceive their experiences in contacts with middle class environmental organizations? From the perspective of working class activists, what role does differential social status play in coalition efforts? Data sources include face-to-face focus groups and interviews, and telephone interviews with a sample of actiuists across the United States representing working class, community-based, grassroots environmental justice organizations. Findings indicate that cooperative efforts involving groups of different status within the contemporary environmental movement are rare and that coalitions do not occur. Social status evaluations are a central factor in determining the likelihood of cooperative efforts and coalition building.

Challenging patriarchal structures: Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya

abstract Within the last two decades, the United Nations has organised world conferences for women in Nairobi and Beijing, in 1985 and 1995 respectively, to draw governments' attention to their obligations to women. These conferences have led to the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies (NFLS) and the Beijing platform for action (BPFA) recommendations. These global women's conferences and agreements place heavy responsibilities on the United Nations system to include gender in all aspects of their work as well as in the work of the member states. These processes have made connections between gender, development, environment and sustainable development. They have, however, not made connections between women's emancipation and the need to challenge existing gender relations. This focus—while reflecting on the gains and challenges of these processes—examines the lessons learnt from Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement, an environmental and social justice organisation in Kenya, which, among other missions, highlighted gendered relations and challenged patriarchy within national and global structures.

"Neither Shall They Train for War Anymore": Reflections on Zionism, Militarism, and Conscientious Objection

This article examines Socialist Zionism, the political philosophy that has indelibly shaped Israel's culture. In particular, this article reveals some of the ways in which this distinctly eastern European Zionism constructs gender and ethnicity in Israel, and how these constructions shape contemporary Israeli culture toward the radicalization of the conflict with the Palestinians. Simultaneously, it explores how Socialist Zionism has rendered invisible structural inequalities among Israeli Jews. Finally, this article describes the role of the Israeli military, a central Zionist institution, in both of these processes, as well as the role of Israeli peace and social justice organizations in countering militarism and promoting peace.

Leo Esclamado

Leo Esclamado with Charles Henry Rowell Click for larger view Figure 1 Leo Esclamado Photo by Wendell Gorden, © 2006 [End Page 1088] ROWELL: How did you become interested in working with the Vietnamese community in New Orleans, especially with its landfill problem? ESCLAMADO: This problem was brought to my attention through the work I was doing with a national non-profit social justice organization I was working with. I am now serving on a one-year fellowship through the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies (NAVASA). My last semester at the University of Florida was with an internship program, The Washington Center, in Washington, DC. ROWELL: When did you begin working? ESCLAMADO: I began working here in late May, 2006. The city had just turned on traffic lights in some places. The hurricane had hit back in August, 2005 ROWELL: You are from Florida, another hurricane ridden state. You have seen the impact of hurricanes on Florida's cities and towns. What was your general impression of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans? ESCLAMADO: Hurricane damage in Florida is usually wind damage, with massive trees and debris down and vegetables and fruits strewn everywhere. What's unique about New Orleans is that it was damaged by wind and stayed flooded with water, with some areas were not pumped out until early September. The lack of communications within bureaus was an alarming situation for me, and also the absence of people in the majority of eastern New Orleans. A lot of the larger business districts and infrastructure in eastern New Orleans—malls, grocery stores and hospitals—have yet to return. If you drive along Interstate 10 from the east to uptown, you can notice the major disparities of rebuilding between communities. ROWELL: Do you know what cause the problem in communications among government agencies? [End Page 1089] ESCLAMADO: In state and city government, there was a lot of conflict—conflict dealing with who has the authority to call an evacuation. There was an issue of jurisdiction. There was no existing system to address those needs. ROWELL: What is the specific nature of your work in New Orleans? ESCLAMADO: I'm working on the landfill campaign that has emerged out of the emergency planning, or the lack planning, in eastern New Orleans and in the greater New Orleans with a newly formed community development group, MQVN CDC. It is short for the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Community Development Corporation. My work is part of NAVASA's mission. It's aim is to develop technical capacity for local community based organizations. One of the obstacles in this long-term process was the landfill campaign against the mayor Nagin's executive order to create and use a landfill next to the predominately Vietnamese American community for all of the construction and demolition debris. He mandated the landfill a few months after the storm. Most of my work has focused on educating local community leaders and politicians about the detrimental effects of the landfill. I have also been working with the community to organize the shutdown of the landfill and for the removal of the debris. ROWELL: Before we discuss the detrimental effects of the landfill, will you talk about the history of the city's casting off rubbish from the hurricane near the Vietnamese American community. Can you just give a brief history of how that came about? When did the city decide to place a landfill near the community? ESCLAMADO: The landfill was originally ordered right after the restriction of Old Gentilly, another landfill in eastern New Orleans. It's probably about four miles away from this landfill, which is called Chef Menteur, the landfill that mayor Nagin ordered. Old Gentilly had already been cited by a lot of environmental groups for its lack of ground water monitoring and its failure to meet other environmental requirements, FEMA also had requested a study and found possibilities of federal liabilities. National levee expert, Dr. Bob Bea also stated this landfill can presently compromise the...

Employee Grievance Programs: Understanding the Nexus between Workplace Justice, Organizational Legitimacy and Successful Organizations

This article explores issues of workplace justice and organization legitimacy founded in formal employee grievance programs and procedures designed to afford aggrieved employees procedural due process, equal treatment and fairness. The depth and breadth of the discussion and debate about what constitutes a successful employee grievance program is interdisciplinary and complex. It focuses on the inevitable tension between management prerogatives and employee rights in the public workplace. At issue is the relationship between workplace justice and legitimacy and its effect on organization efficiency and effectiveness. The author contends that workplace justice and organization success are closely tied to the legitimate actions of first-line supervisors and human resource managements' abilities to design institutions capable of fulfilling their social responsibilities in self-preserving ways. This will require a better understanding of how formal employee grievance procedures alter cooperative, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for resolving employees' workplace concerns, complaints, and disputes in public organizations.

Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

The politics of natural resource access, control and exploitation assume fundamental relations of social power; they imply them and consolidate them. Environmental issues reflect broader patterns of domination and social exclusion at work in global politics which enable us to understand who benefits from the current distribution of environmental benefits and which social groups shoulder a disproportionate amount of the burden of pollution. The task, however, is not merely to identify those global structures that produce environmental inequities and injustices, but to show how, in some cases, those structures are supported and entrenched by the institutional configurations that we continue to assume are generating the solutions to environmental degradation. Towards this end, I connect debates about the global managerial class and critiques of the prevailing sustainable development historical bloc with more localized studies of the consequences of organized inequality and the strategies adopted by marginalized groups to contest their fate as victims of environmental injustice. Such an approach builds upon the project which Marian Miller began with her enquiries into the Third World in global environmental politics, emphasizing the importance of the global political economy in shaping those political relations. Political and social cleavages of race, class and gender are shown to be key to understanding the global organization of environmental inequality and justice, though it is the neglect of the first two dimensions, in particular, that forms the core concern of this paper. Their importance in understanding patterns of causation (distribution of benefit), process (access, voice, representation) and distribution (of harm) is highlighted through reference to a range of contemporary case studies in the global North and South.

Corpos do poder: operadores jurídicos na periferia de São Paulo

O texto propõe-se a interpretar situações observadas em pesquisa de campo realizada em um equipamento público inovador quanto à organização dos serviços de justiça e segurança. Trata-se de levantamento de dados sobre a implementação e o funcionamento dos Centros de Integração da Cidadania - CIC, programa governamental desenvolvido em São Paulo (Brasil), que visa melhorar o acesso à justiça e à cidadania e também à segurança das populações residentes em bairros periféricos. O programa apoiava-se na visão de que a democratização da sociedade brasileira relaciona-se intimamente com a adoção, pelos órgãos da Justiça, de outras funções e feições: ao invés de agentes da repressão penal na periferia, os operadores da justiça, a partir dos CIC, passariam ao papel de agentes da efetivação da cidadania nos espaços de maior exclusão social. Para a análise, elegeu-se o referencial analítico foucaultiano, em que é central o tema da corporificação - a produção cultural e política dos corpos. Interroga-se em que medida o desempenho dos operadores no programa indica possibilidades políticas de resistência, introduz rupturas na constante diferenciação entre os corpos, que caracteriza a atividade judicial clássica, abre possibilidades para a emergência de uma nova corporificação dos agentes públicos da justiça, reduzindo a desigualdade entre operadores e cidadãos comuns (de modo a contribuir para a construção de uma cidadania pautada na igualdade jurídica e na democracia). Procura-se desvendar os sutis mecanismos pelos quais a atuação do Estado cria efeitos de validação do poder de uma classe sobre as outras.

Building Bridges or Building Walls? Explaining Regionalization Among Transnational Social Movement Organizations

Before the mid-1980s, most transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) organized across the North-South divide. However, since the mid-1980s data show that more TSMOs are organized exclusively within either the global North or South. To explain this pattern, I analyze ties between regionally organized TSMOs and other nongovernmental organizations. Groups in the global South were more likely than their Northern counterparts to maintain cross-regional ties. At the same time, Northern groups were significantly more likely to report only regional ties. Environmental and women's organizations were the most likely to maintain only regional ties while economic justice and human rights organizations were the most likely to report cross-regional ties. These findings suggest that the regionalization of TSMOs is best explained as a response to the institutional environment rather than a consequence of intramovement conflict and polarization.

Who Is Most at Risk of Becoming a Convicted Rapist? The Likelihood of a Rape Conviction among the 1966 Birth Cohort in Denmark

The conventional response to the atrocious crime of rape is punishment. However, the aim of criminal justice organizations should be to prevent the behaviour occurring in the first place. Using results from a prospective study of all boys born in 1966 in Denmark where those convicted of rape (N=96) between the ages of 15 and 27 years are compared with those who are not (N=43,307), various risk factors are identified. Identifying risk factors does not produce a panacea but illustrates a possible prevention programme. While recognizing that those convicted of rape may not be representative of all those committing rape, prevention of rape may usefully be associated with enhancing the life chances of fathers and sons, in providing greater support for those who have been in foster/residential care, and in recognizing that parental or personal psychiatric illness may have serious consequences. The fact that the risk factors for future violence are similar to those for rape endorses the point that rape is essentially a violence offence rather than a sex offence. It further demonstrates that prevention programmes for rape will have associated benefits.1

Code Pink: The 21st century mothers of invention

As women in the USA move forward with their activism, they must appreciate the great advances brought about by the women pioneers who came before. Because of the noble and heroic work of their predecessors, the women of today are able to venture beyond issues of women's rights and gender inequality. Although there is still much to be accomplished on these fronts, the current injustices wrought by corporate globalization, US imperialism, unjustifiable wars, and religious fanaticism, have redirected women activists from the national stage into the global arena. Linda Milazzo introduces Code Pink as a key women's organization that collaborates closely with social justice organizations throughout the world. It has put a new face on women's activism with a fierceness and creativity that would make Susan B. Anthony grin, and blush, all at the same time. Unlike its feminist forerunners, who chose message above fashion, and ‘Ms.’ over ‘Mademoiselle’, Code Pink has brazenly invented a cheeky new chic. Milazzo argues that Code Pink is the activist equivalent of Victoria's Secret catalog (a US publication of sexy lingerie) meets the Nation Magazine, employing flash and femininity to promote socio-political change.

Suppressing the Financing of Terrorism

Combating the financing of terrorism is a key tool in the ‘war against terror’, yet has passed rela-tively undetected amongst the many other measures that add to the arsenal of the state’s coercivepowers and the global dominance of the United States. These measures dramatically expand thediscretionary power of law enforc ement to respond to political activity as crime and provide a mech-anism through which governments can financially cripple individuals, charities, welfare andsocial justice organizations. This article sets out the nature and impa ct of some of the combating offinancing of terrorism measures post-9/11 within a state crime framework and broader critiques ofthe war on terror, and highlights a case study of alternative remittance or informal bankingsystems. Introduction

Prison Health in Russia: The Larger Picture

Russia, despite recent legal reforms, still has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world. There are many reports of the adverse conditions in Russian prisons, often highlighting the consequences for health, in particular, risks of HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. However, there are no reviews of the broader health issues in the Russian penal system. This paper reviews the available information on the health of the imprisoned population in Russia and the factors underlying it. It was undertaken by means of a search of Russian and international literature, including unpublished sources, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 27 key informants from the Ministry of Justice, prison administration, and non-governmental organizations. Published and unpublished data from the ministries of health and justice were used to describe the demographic characteristics of the imprisoned population and compare it with the general population. Although convicts are drawn disproportionately from disadvantaged groups in society and are detained in adverse physical conditions, the standardized mortality ratio from all causes is slightly over one-third of that in the overall Russian male population. This is mainly explained by an eight-fold lower mortality from external causes and a more than two-fold lower mortality from cardiovascular disease. These far outweigh the increased mortality from infectious diseases. The chances of survival of young men in Russia may actually be improved by being in prison, highlighting the need for policies that reduce the overall level of violence and other external risks, such as dangerous driving habits, in Russian society. Yet while conditions are improving in Russian prisons, with death rates falling, there are still many avoidable deaths and high levels of mental illness and infectious disease. There is also much that is not known about the health of Russian convicts, with what is available reflecting what is measured rather than what is important.

Reflections on the iconography of environmental justice activism

The United States environmental justice movement has grown in the last 20 years from tactical cooperation between civil rights and environmental activists on hazardous waste issues into a broad‐based movement for social change. As dozens of organizations invest resources in an environmental justice agenda, it is important to examine how such organizations portray their stance toward the goals of the larger movement in order to better understand tensions within the movement between social justice and environmental protection, diversity and commonality, and localized and broader movement agendas. This paper explores what contemporary environmental justice imagery tells us about this social movement through a critical discourse analysis of environmental justice organizations’ logos. The conceptual approach used here links a tradition of critical discourse analysis of textual materials with elements of a critical visual methodology. The paper examines how the social grievance of environmental injustice is constructed in relation to the social and natural world, and considers what these images tell us about the identities, relationships and modes of authority that constitute the contemporary environmental justice movement.

Empowering Youth and Creating Healthy Environments in Northern Manhattan: WE ACT's Youth Programs

Racial minority children, youth and families in the United States suffer disproportionately from urban environmental health problems. This field report focuses on how one community-based environmental justice organization in New York City, West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT), has focused on youth organizing around environmental health issues to improve the lives of the individual participants in their youth programs, while supporting larger organizational and community goals for an improved urban environment. WE ACT's youth programs have come in two forms: the Earth Crew Youth Leadership Program and DIFFERENTT (Diverse Individuals Fighting for Environmental and Reproductive Rights Now 'Til Tomorrow) which focuses on relationships between reproductive, environmental, and community health. This report outlines the social, political, and geographic contexts for WE ACT's youth programs. It also highlights their underlying experiential learning philosophy, as well as their connections to WE ACT's community-based environmental health research and political agenda for improving the environment in Northern Manhattan.

Practicing Democracy: Early American Authors in Twenty-First-Century Communities

Practicing Democracy:Early American Authors in Twenty-First-Century Communities Pattie Cowell (bio) In April 2003, I attended a Public Dialogue Series Action Forum in Fort Collins, Colorado. Organized through the Fort Collins Human Rights Office, it was the culminating event of a six-week series of small-group conversations about building community after 9/11. Some 150 community members—concerned citizens, elected officials, members of faith communities and social justice organizations, students from Colorado State University and Front Range Community College, Latinos and Anglos, evangelical Christians and Muslims, republicans and socialists, old folks and high school students—gathered in an auditorium at the Senior Center to plan the actions their weeks of talking across difference had brought them to. Individual participant's action commitments to themselves and their communities were flashing in a power point loop on an auditorium screen as people arrived for the session. But the evening wasn't about individual actions. It was about what we could do together. I was there with a few students from my early American authors class. They had chosen this dialogue series as their service learning project for the semester. For weeks, we had been asking ourselves how Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography might speak to the young man in the dialogue series who suggested that public schools ought to "teach real honest history," not the "stories adults think are safe for young people." We had been exploring how citizen petitions in the twenty-first century might compare with eighteenth-century Black petitions for freedom. We had been putting into practice Thoreau's dictum from Walden that "[students] should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end" (94). While these students were working in dialogue circles with diverse Fort Collins citizens, other students in this upper-division early American authors [End Page 363] course were collecting life stories from residents in a nursing home, tutoring at-risk adolescents in a court-mandated residential school, developing the creative writing skills of middle-school students in a charter school with an experiential learning curriculum, and playing pinochle and pool at the Senior Center. As students gave their various community partners at least 15 hours of service, they were listening hard for the ways in which the individuals they encountered found their voices and built communities. Students kept journals, shared service stories in classroom groups and in larger discussions, wrote a reflection paper, and participated in a series of panel presentations to class members and community partners as part of the final event that replaced a final exam. In the process, they enriched our discussions of community and voice in Bradstreet and Jefferson, Franklin and Thoreau, Stowe and Douglass, with insights and questions from their service learning experiences. They imagined a world in which there was no United States, and they grappled with the issues that brought a nation and a multitude of new communities into North America. They began to ask some of the same questions that American founding documents address, and they came to see why those questions are still the sites of such contention and importance. What stories do we Americans tell about ourselves and our origins? Who gets to tell community stories? With what consequences? How do citizens balance order and freedom? Who is a citizen, and what does a citizen do? How do we foster the arts? Who can access the full benefits of community? Who can't? How do we support meaningful family life? Who has power? For what? It's the usual heady stuff of early American studies in undergraduate curricula, with a twist. This time students were asked to engage the questions in their communities as well as in the classroom, in their world as well as in their minds. They were asked to supplement their reading and class discussions with field research. Taking a page from John Dewey and political scientist Benjamin Barber, they worked from the assumption that "the point where democracy and education intersect is the point we call community" (Barber 225). I've been using a version of this service-learning assignment for several years, in...

Grassroots Environmental Organizations in the United States: A Gramscian Analysis*

The theoretical approach utilized in this study is based on the pieces of information scattered throughout Antonio Gramsci's work and the extrapolation made out of his notion of hegemony. From a Gramscian perspective, social movements are creative reactions to contracting hegemony. To the extent that it provides room for the existence of collective actions, hegemony is expansive; yet, because it is not total, the condition for the existence of counter-hegemonies that call to question its “essentials” also exists. The case of grassroots environmental justice organizations in the United States (GEJOs) that deal with first-order quality of life issues falls within the province of the latter dynamics. GEJOs deal with an issue limited in scope, viz., environmental crisis; however, their movement participants have contested the multiple dimensions of existing hegemony. These organizations, as total counter-hegemonies, have challenged the political, economic, intellectual, and cultural orders of the American society. The interest in distributive justice, participatory democracy, public-oriented scientific endeavor, and a well-ordered cultural realm based on a universal good sense are the fundamental elements of an alternative hegemony manifest or latent in the discursive formations and practices of GEJOs. The study is based on document analysis and interpretation of the literature on GEJOs in the United States.

‘Justice in the Community’ in The Netherlands

‘Justice in the Community’ in The Netherlands promotes the cooperation between criminal justice and other organizations. It increases the visibility of the Public Prosecution to other partners and has an important symbolic function for citizens in multi-problem urban areas, which the state has not left alone with their problems. The scheme also promotes the use of more integrated and extra-judicial reactions to crime and, by using a range of mediation methods, more attention is paid to the position of victims of crime. ‘Justice in the Community’ creates more rapid interventions and settlements of criminal cases. However, there is no evidence that ‘Justice in the Community’ results in a higher levels of ‘objective and subjective safety’ in the neighbourhoods concerned. Some fundamental issues with regard to ‘Justice in the Community’ are discussed, for example, the blurring of boundaries between organizations and their responsibilities, the legitimation of the exchange of information between the participating organizations and the question to what extent the introduction of ‘Justice in the Community’ should be understood as the symptom of a process of juridification.

Breaking in: Gaining entry to prisons and other hard-to-access criminal justice organizations*

There exists a large body of literature on doing research with hard-to-access populations such as the mentally ill, gang members, prison inmates, correctional officers, and wardens. There is little discussion, however, on getting access to criminal justice organizations in the first place. This article offers several practical suggestions for “breaking in” to prisons and other criminal justice organizations. This article emphasizes getting access to agency-collected data.

Who Will Volunteer? Religiosity, Everyday Racism, and Social Participation Among African American Men

This study explores the relative importance of everyday racism, empathic concern, communalism, and religiosity as predictors of pro-social involvement (i.e., volunteerism and membership in political/social justice organizations) among a sample of African American men (N = 151). Church involvement emerged as a positive predictor of the likelihood that these men were involved in volunteer work as well as the number of hours that men dedicated to volunteer work. Communalism positively predicted the amount of time (in hours per year) that men were involved in volunteer work. Subjective religiosity and the stress of everyday racism were associated with a greater likelihood of being a member of a political–social justice organization. Implications of these findings are discussed.